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BACCALAUREATE SERMONS 



BACCALAUREATE 
SERMONS 



PRESIDENT M. WOOLSEY STRYKER 

TO THE GRADUATING CLASSES OF 

HAMILTON COLLEGE, 1893-1905 



WILLIAM T. SMITH & CO. 

iana 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two Copies Received 

NOV 28 1905 

Copyriffht Entry 
CLAS'S CL XXc No. 






Copyrighted 1905 
by M. Woolsey Stryker 



CONTENTS 

Page 

I. SEEING THE UNSEEN, 9 

II. THE INDISSOLUBLE LIFE, 23 

III. RADICAL AND CONSERVATIVE, 35 

IV. THE REVELATIONS OF RESERVE, 49 

V. THE ABUNDANT LIFE, 61 

VI. OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM, 68 

VII. THE STATION OF OBEDIENCE, 81 

VIII. THE BETTER WAY, 91 

IX. SPECIALISM AND SYMPATHY, 99 

X. SYMMETRY, 111 
XL PROBLEMS OF CHURCH AND COLLEGE, 119 

XII. THE GLORIFICATION OF SERVICE, 129 

XIII. DEMOCRACY AND CHRISTIANITY, 136 



SEEING THE UNSEEN 

TO THE GRADUATING CLASS, JUNE 18, 1898 

He endured as seeing Him who is invisible. 

Hebrews, 11:27. 

The Letter to the Hebrews was both an argument and an 
appeal. With its array of fact and its august consolations, 
there blended an unfaltering and personal trust in God. 
That confidence in and commitment to Him is of the very 
essence of true religion. Religion is either the fulfilment of 
a real relationship, or it is a fond dream. The spirit of con- 
stancy is so sustained and illuminative thro this whole writ- 
ing as to make it, concerning faith, the classical source both 
of definition and instance. 

Not in any special phase or exercise, but absolute and 
generic, faith is affirmed as the basis of life and the warrant 
of all rational hope. The book deals with the apparent 
vicissitudes of an ever-moving process, and at the same time 
with the consistency and constancy of Him who guides this, 
— mutability and the Immutable. By broad retrospect it 
would prepare men to recognize and meet ungrievingly the 
disciplines of change. At the eleventh chapter the argument 
proper culminates with the resonant citation of preeminent 
believers. Certain of the venerable roll are named, souls of 
altitude, and classes are summoned, of those who having 
won their rest, make up the celestial part of that holy alli- 
ance and comradeship in which all souls are one who love 
and seek the will of God. 

" Compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses " — 
they who were once the spectacle and who now are the spec- 
tators — we have the tremendous appeal increased. The 
clenching thought is that these veterans are to have their 
work perfected in those things provided for later days and 
riper faith. 



Fascinating and rewarding as the whole analysis and var- 
ious aspect of this great epistle must be found, let us press 
in toward that core-idea which rules it all. 

What was that " wherein the elders had witness borne to 
them"? What is the theorem upon which this chapter 
moves? At the outset, it is given, — a definition which in- 
spires our whole instinct of flight, and lifts our eyes past the 
hills, beyond the path of the eagles, up the ways of the 
angels ! " Now faith — (and there the writer leaves the 
ground and takes the wings of the morning) — " faith is the 
proving of things not seen " — the " assurance of things 
hoped for." Faith is itself a proof, a conviction. This 
eleventh chapter is that proposition amplified by instance. 
It begins at the beginning (as Genesis and John begin) with 
" the word of God." We know " that what is seen hath 
not been made out of things which do appear," that is, 
" that which we look upon did not come from phenomena." 
Spirit and life are behind objects. First-cause precedes 
second causes. Word is back of world. The seen is the 
result of the unseen. The Creation is that over and thro 
which the Creator lives and moves, and the creature who 
knows this and so lives joins the triumphs of those great 
Hebrew men. 

It is upon the thought that our text condenses, that this 
roster of great and effectual men proceeds. At the point 
where we station our meditation Moses is the immediate in- 
stance. Out text analyzes his life and sums it. Unmatched 
and solitary that life stands above all the lives of the old 
Testament: forty years in Egypt, forty years in Midian, 
forty in the Wilderness, — " endurance," all the way from 
Nile side to Pisgah top! 

Such enduring, under such burdens, borne by such a man, 
must be accounted for! It must have "assurance" and 
" proof " under it. And thus the writer to the Hebrews (and 
so to all souls perplexed by ages of transition and mental dis- 
turbance) utters this epitome of all that Moses was and did — 
10 



strikes the chord in which all his life was one of displace- 
ments. It was also one of submissions because of convictions. 
He accepted the loneliness of leadership. He became therein 
a type, at once of the sorrow and the grandeur of a prophetic 
soul. He did not fear Egypt's king; for face to face he knew 
the "blessed and only Potentate, eternal, immortal, invisible," 
who made poor both the riches and the wrath of Pharoah. 

This contrast is in our text, but the very Greek states 
even more broadly the secret of faith — it is generic not per- 
sonal — " rov yap aoparov w? 6pQ)v " — " as seeing the unseen/* — 
God, and all else secured in God — the ruler, and the whole 
realm beyond present vision. We keep both the euphony 
and the paradox of the holy page when we say that faith is 
the sight of the unseen. That then for our theme. Tran- 
scendental as the statement is, it announces the real wisdom 
and the real life of the soul. All uplifted and uplifting souls 
have endured as seeing the unseen. Would that this pene- 
trative beam of truth might scatter the vagueness with 
which we think of Faith! It is the vision of the invisible 
— the " heavenly vision." This " conviction of things not 
seen " is a test and organon. What the eye is to sense, that 
confidence in God is to the soul! Sense is not the last of us, 
we are hyper- physical — we are made to touch the impalpa- 
ble, to hear the inaudible, to see the unsighted. 

It is this idea of the soul's true function and self-prophecy 
that speaks in many another New Testament expression. 
This very word Aopara marks that other great statement 
" the unseen things of Him are seen by the things made." 
Nature is a telescope! 

Paul speaks of Christ as " The image of the unseen God." 

"The things seen are for a while and the things unseen are 
forever." 

If we " have the eyes of our hearts enlightened " we shall 
look for the reality that underlies all that is but apparent, 
and find that — 

" Earth *s crammed with Heaven." 

11 



Faith is a " spirit of seeing," spiritual second sight. It is 
logical. It reasons from the consistency of God. The child 
clutches his father's hand in the night and so walks homeward 
thro the dark, and " we go by faith, not by what we see." 
It is faith to go out " not knowing whither," because we 
know with Whom. 

Faith is always this — confidence in and commitment to a 
person. It is not guessing, arguing, taking chances, — it is 
trusting someone who is trustworthy. Trust is more than a 
persuasion from visible evidence, it is self-proving. It is not 
merely one emotion or attitude out of many, it is a total and 
vital connection with what lies beyond the boundary of the 
five senses — "the masterlight of all our seeing"; — the 
response of our life to His life who gave us ours — and who 
made outer light the universal parable of the inner. Soul at 
last can be satisfied only with soul. We " thirst for the 
living God ", and surrendering to the compulsions of an irre- 
sistible hope we find suddenly that faith guides reason. 
Without it reason is not a safe leader, for it is not sane. 
Certainty is more than sight, it is insight. All progress, all 
skill, comes by trusting ourselves to that next step which is 
ever just beyond present knowledge. It is not as a mere 
optigraph of Heaven that these scriptures are holy; but 
because they prompt that trust in a trustworthy God, 
which is life eternal already begun. Nor is it only in man's 
relation to God, but also in his relation to every other per- 
son with whom he has to do, that faith is indispensable. In 
all matters, ocular evidence is neither final nor chief. " With- 
out faith it is impossible to please " anyone ! The soul 
itself, and its impartiality, count in all convictions. Every- 
where we have to reckon with what lies below the horizon. 
In all things good faith is more than compulsion. There is no 
sphere of thought or action in which it is rational to " dwell 
only in things seen", to inspect only " the things before the 
face." The apostle Peter uses the very word " myopy " 
when he speaks of those who are spiritually " near-sighted" 
1* 



Everywhere the unseen presses for recognition. Whether 
in the laboratory, or the garden, on the judge's bench, or 
upon one's knees — reverence and expectancy toward the 
" things not seen as yet " are indispensable to great result. 

To go on from observation to classification, from conse- 
quences to cause, from instance to rule, — all assortment and 
all synthesis, — means faith. 

The quest alike of the eager mind and of the longing heart 
is for that ultimate unity in Whom power and pity meet. 
We are not in fear of too much learning, but of too little! 
The legal cannot be too exact : but that it may be exact it 
must be loyal. We are carefully to look down that at last 
we may fervently look up ! Love is the way of prospect. 

We are already in what we call " the other world ", for 
God's realms are one. Only now we are withheld from the 
upper light. We are shut within the shell of sense, and, 
with sense, can see only its smooth and hard limitations: 
but we have equipments for which those walls are too nar- 
row, tho now in embryo we reckon that wings mean some- 
thing, and with an act which stakes itself upon the conviction 
of accessible tho as yet unperceived realities we use the beak 
upon the fragile and temporary wall ! 

We are sure that the vast is not a void, that derivative life 
answers creative life, that longing is the clue whereby to 
track love to its source, that conscience is a ' right line ' be- 
tween man and his Maker, that " the spirit of man is the 
candle of the Lord," that these things of sight are " a copy 
and shadow of the heavenly things," — and so, the deep 
within us calling to and answering the deep above us, we 
make God's statutes our songs, pitch our pilgrim tents to- 
ward the apocalypse, and rejoice in Him " Whom not having 
seen we love." 

But let us come to the fact that the perception of that 
which is out of sight is not an exceptional but a normal 
function. In every growing and advancing life men " hope 
for that which they see not." All lofty imagination is of a 

13 



kind with faith. Duty uses the same faculties and the same 
methods that we use in all affairs, only the purpose is lifted 
toward God and the scale prolongs into eternity. 

The life of the spirit simply applies to the Being above, 
that which every day relations apply to the beings about us. 
Civilization rests upon faith. Society is Mosaic with that 
which does, dares, and endures, " seeing the unseen." Faith, 
as religious, is not different in essence, but in direction. Men 
who renounce the service of the unseen God, serve their un- 
seen fellows with this very faculty. Architecture works with 
the same problems whether one builds a church spire or a 
grain elevator, and certainty as to the external and as to the 
eternal world is in either case a reasoning from the seen to 
the unseen. There is no working theory, in physics or 
psychics, that is not an illustration of faith. Assurance 
of the undiscovered, all induction, all foresight, travels 
Moses' way. Tell me, what other brilliant generalization 
from particulars ever shot such light on man's mental or 
moral path as the thought of the trustworthiness, the 
fidelity, of the Creator — that the universe is a rational and 
not a capricious result? 

We eat, sleep, trade, by faith. You wrap money or love 
in a letter, scratch a few marks on it, attach a stamp, put it 
into the box at the nearest corner, and wait, with a thousand 
" maybes " menacing, for your answer from Iceland or Cal- 
cutta; all because you believe in the integrity and efficiency 
of the post service. And is it credulity to believe Him "Whose 
eyes outrun the morning and Who maketh spirits His mes- 
sengers?" You cable a friend across the sea and get his 
reply by a strand 3000 miles long; will you cavil at His word 
" running very swiftly " Who said, " Before they call I will 
answer and while they are yet speaking I will hear! " 

Albany, and " 51," the fastest and promptest train in the 
world, is twelve minutes late by the board. Men walk watch 
in hand, for they are assured of the Empire State Express. 

14 



Ten minutes — eleven — and over the Hudson a film of smoke 
wavers up, while as we watch, far this side the train curves 
into sight and swings out over the bridge. All is haste. 
Clang go the testing hammers along the wheels. Clank, 
clank, answer the journal-boxes. Couplers and air-tubes 
snap to their places, and we are behind " 893. " Tom Der- 
mody, white-haired but keen of eye, is in the saddle there, 
eight feet over the ties. He has given the cups their fill of 
velvet oil, and alert and ready the creature waits, with 
strange, deep-drawn sighs, the touch of the hand that will 
hold it to its work. " 'Board I " and at the word the throttle 
feels the touch, the mass of mechanism answers the mind 
that commands it, and we are off. Six feet six, twenty feet 
at every turn, the huge drivers respond to the steam. Up 
the steep grade, the wheels biting the sanded track, swift 
and more swiftly, past avenue and factory, and the pusher 
is outsped. Away now into the West. Along the glistening 
lines of Bessemer, down hill we go — 56, 55, 54 seconds to 
the mile. Five times each second does that piston make and 
recover its 24-inch stroke — a hundred tons of steel, with a 
heart of flame, hurling itself toward the sunset! The sandy 
plains swing backward, the Mohawk unwinds its silvery rib- 
bon, the hills stand aside, and by orchard and quarry, thro 
town and valley, in, out, swinging, sliding, leaping — it is 
ever on! What a race! Curving as the river curves, the 
train seems to cling convulsively to the rails over which it 
rushes. Can that slender flange hold this awful centrifugal 
force? How possible seems one mad plunge, with not a soul 
left this side of eternity to tell what it was like! And, now 
we think of it, is the engineer competent, cool, sober? Has 
he good eyes? Are all the switches true? The semaphores 
twitch to the horizontal : but that is for those who follow us. 
How is it ahead! No pause. Our steed drinks upon the 
gallop. Rocking with the storm of motion, Tom Dermody 
peers into the distance and draws the bar a little wider. On! 
Here trailed the Iroquois. Here Herkimer struggled toward 

15 



Fort Stanwix. Here went Kirkland thro the wilderness and 
the winter. Could they rise up to look, what would they 
conceive this thing to be — this blazing, screaming terror — 
this tornado of iron? Behold adjustment, contrivance, fuel, 
fire, force — - nay more, it is an epitome of this strenuous and 
Earth-subduing age — it is the transit of the Saxon! Now 
Deerfield hills throw back the long shriek, sharper than any 
savage cry of their wild days, and the complaining wheels 
smother their riot pace under the touch of the same power 
that compelled them to it. Slower, tho rebelling, slower, and 
then — still. "Utica!" Ninety-five miles in 90 minutes! 
On time! 

And you submit yourself to that pace and peril, with its 
multiplied chances of stupid switchmen, flaws in spike or 
axle, imperfect inspection, a thousand risks to the mile, 
trusting thus your life and other lives more precious to you, 
because you have confidence in the management of the New 
York Central. You will, I say, give yourself to all this 
mechanism which you do not understand, and to the man- 
agement with which you are unacquainted, and yet insist 
that only ' seeing is believing ' ! What credulous incred- 
ulity is that which refuses to the Creator's control of His 
own world that which it bestows upon the officials of a 
railway! 

But turn to the market. What is credit, national or inter- 
national, but trust in that " which no man hath seen or can 
see"? Certifications, vouchers, endorsements, bonds, — are 
these 'sight'? What is 'security' but personality? What 
were our banks, our whole system of exchange, the United 
States Treasury itself, without confidence in common con- 
science? 

I say faith is the world's clearing house. Financial infi- 
delity breeds palsy. What is panic but doubt scaring itself 
into worse doubt? When but a percentage of unbelief dif- 
fuses thro the world of trade, haggard calamity peers in at a 
thousand doors. What if all faith were destroyed! That 

16 



were such a catastrophe as if the world were suddenly 
arrested in its turning and all things upon it snapped into 
bottomless chaos. 

When relief comes after a stringent or a barren market it 
is not because there is more money, but because there is less 
commercial agnosticism! And here remember that business 
credit is what it is by a diffused Christianity. The banks 
of the world are not in pagan lands. By this river all things 
flourish. No more than I would starve while holding a cer- 
tified cheque upon the Chemical Bank, no more will I fail to 
use what I have every reason to think bears the very signa- 
ture of God. 

It is by faith, social, domestic, financial, scholarly, scien- 
tific, — as well as religious, — that we live. Faithlessness is 
barbarism. It is also treason, for how can one be a patriot 
and at the same time a cynic? 

This sixth sense is good sense and none other. Indigent 
indeed is he who has it not. As the vestal of God, Nature 
lights our way. It is not by observing the lantern, but the 
way it lightens, that we get us home. He who cares only 
for objects, and not for the subject of them all, consents to 
mere optical illusion. 

But I speak of the endurance which the sight of the 
unseen teaches and inspires. It is this that measures power 
for daring and for waiting. The size of your faith is the 
size of your manhood. The believers are the doers. Faith 
is no idler's possession. It is a high exercise of power. It 
bids keenly for action. It is an energy of the whole nature. 
It propels and compels. It leads, and is heroic. 

That Roman was a stalwart believer in his city who 
bought up the land on which the Carthaginian army was 
camped ! 

" There is no unbelief; 
Whoever plants a seed beneath the sod, 
And waits to see it push away the clod, 

He trusts in God. 

17 



Whoever says, when clouds are in the sky, 
' Be patient, heart, light breaketh by and by,' 
Trusts the Most High. 

Whoever lieth on his couch to sleep, 
Content to lock his sense in slumber deep, 
Knows God will keep. 

Whoever says ' Tomorrow,' ' The unknown,' 
' The future,' trusts that Power alone 
He dares disown. 

The heart that looks on when the eyelids close, 
And dares to live when life has only woes, 
God's comfort knows. 

There is no unbelief ; 
And day by day, and night, unconsciously, 
The heart lives by that faith the lips deny ; 

God knoweth why." 

It was this sight of the unseen that sent Columbus over 
the sea, that kept Washington in heart as he manoeuvered 
his footsore regiments across the Jerseys; and there was 
never a discoverer, a commander, a liberator, an inventor, an 
author, who was not strong in faith, if strong at all. It is 
this presentative faculty that has led to all the realized mar- 
vels of physical science. The heroism alike of the inventor, 
the discoverer, the martyr, is faith teaching endurance. To 
imagine is to pursue. 

Leverrier predicted and placed Neptune, with its orbit of 
165 years, because he believed in gravitation. And faith is 
no more audacious, is just as exact, as scientific, when it 
trusts His consistent goodness Whom all events obey as 
firmly as the battalions of the stars march West. 

Science is Faith plus Investigation. Religion is Faith plus 
Service. The sciences, of sense or of the soul, are both com- 
pelled to use the same implement. " The believer in the 
unseen atom should be the last to ridicule belief in the 
unseen God." The unseen is at once the problem and the 
power of all search. 

18 



You are more than all of your senses. It is soul that 
quivers, exults, moans, rejoices. Your senses are but post- 
men handing you what they do not read, — electric trans- 
mitters, if you please, but only mechanical. Back of these 
personal being sits, listening as blind Milton listened while 
his daughters pronounced to him the Greek they did not 
comprehend. Look ! Yonder is Beethoven, old and stone 
deaf. He weaves passion, pain and peace into strange, 
immortal harmonies. He forges music into light. He is 
rapt as a Sibyl: but the voice of the oracle is all within. He 
can not hear his own harpsichord ! His soul plays on, and 
on, shreds of the symphonies of Heaven, and he endured as 
hearing the unheard ! 

These are souls that open their windows to the day. They 
are horizoned by beckoning hands. Strength to meet and to 
master the emergencies of life can only come from the guid- 
ance of God, and this can only come by that choice which 
makes Him the first in our hearts. Decision wonderfully 
clears the mind. God reveals Himself to those who surrender 
to His guardianship. We but shift our doubts from one 
hand to the other so long as we forget that in everything com- 
mitment seals conviction. Self-will shuts the door from self- 
knowledge. Sensualism staggers into the clutch of scoffing. 
Mighty faith comes only to mighty devotedness. None can 
teach you his faith, nor give it. You must buy for yourselves 
and pay God's price. The deepest is incommunicable save 
from above. 

" How can he give his neighbor the real ground, 
His own conviction?" 

A bystander perceives only the absurdity of a telephone 
dialog, because his ear does not catch the responding voice. 
Only the axis of a telescope or a tunnel is the line of vision. 
When Titus took Jerusalem and penetrated to the Holy of 
Holies he saw nothing. The Shekinah was not for him. We 
abide in the truth in so far as there is truth in us. Belief 
and life are something more than showing that faith toward 

19 



God has rational analogies. The certainty that vanquishes 
objection is not argument, but commitment. The blessing 
of Him that dwelt in the burning bush awaits all who will 
turn aside to see. Self-giving is the price of all high com- 
panionships. Hastening into the sweet fulfilments or the 
terrible surprises of the unseen, (one, or the other, they shall 
be to us each) we may well quit all else for that which alone 
has " the powers of the world to come." This is dynamic. 
A sense of the security of righteousness, of the stability of 
God, can only come by a surrender absolute to the Father 
of our Spirits. That life of Moses, stupendous with strug- 
gle, danger, disappointment, was crowned with a testimony 
which was also autobiography, — " The Eternal God is thy 
refuge and underneath are the everlasting arms." The shell 
will shatter at last! 

" Wings! wings! 
To touch the hem of the veil that swings, 
As moved by the breath of God, between 
The world of sense and the world unseen ; 
To swoon where the mystic folds divide, 
And wake, a child on the other side; 
To wake and wonder if it be so, 
And weep for joy at the loss of wo; 
To know the seeker is lost and found; 
To find Love's being but not his bound; 
Oh for the living that dying brings ! 
Wings I wings ! 

Class of 1893: 

You will not ask me to forget that you are the first to 
whom it is my duty to say these syllables of parting. I shall 
always remember it. 

I have longed to suggest a quickening and inspiring thing 
to you, that should help you, under God, toward mastery, 
first of yourselves and second of your circumstances. His 
presence Who loved you and gave Himself for you, must 
broaden and deepen my incompetent words. 
20 



It is my last occasion with you. Other feet shall tread the 
ways of our bright hill- top, — others shall answer the chapel 
call : but, all together, I can never pray with you again, nor 
talk with you over that open Bible. It is the last time. 
Bear then with one more loving and fervent exhortation. In 
the name of our good College, and by the memory of those 
who with prayer and toil dedicated its unseen future to the 
God of Wisdom; in the name of those graduate ranks of 
staunch and reverent men that now are to receive you; in 
the name of those who have taught you here with genuine 
solicitude for your noblest training, " seeking not yours but 
you," than whom you may find more plausible friends, but 
none sincerer; — nay, by your own responsibility to your 
Saviour and your Judge; — I charge you, be men of second 
sight I While the visionaries who fix their affections on this 
unsubstantial pageant of the senses chide you with absent- 
mindedness, look you with the vision of the seer, on into 
the world of ultimate realities, and put the facts of the soul 
before the fancies of the senses. 

Educate your spirit's vision by using it. Leave both the 
upstarts who make little of life's most serious and unsilenc- 
able questions, and the dastards who avoid them. Let God 
print upon the inner wall of your very eyelids these words — 
" as seeing the unseen," and when sense all fails, when 
you curtain your eyes in that swift prayer for light which 
each of you must sometime pray, when all is dark but duty, 
then remember the kingdom of the invisible, 

" nor bate a jot 
Of heart or hope: but. still bear up, and steer 
Right onward." 

You have mistakes but also bright successes behind you: 
yet neither way are they final. You may offset the mistakes. 
You must surpass the successes. To answer the time that 
with a bugle call challenges constancy of soul and the 
heroisms of a spiritual philosophy, you must hold fast Him 
who today is so near to you. May the light of the knowl- 

21 



edge of the glory of God shine in your hearts in the face of 
Jesus Christ! He is your soul's Lord, your Master, your 
Example, your Redeemer. Seize His loving hand! He will 
stand by you in the furnace of temptation, in the prison of 
afflictions, in the solitude of responsibility. You shall come 
more and more intimately to know Him, and more and 
more deeply as the rough years move, shall you feel that His 
tender promise is for you, " Yet a little while and ye 

SHALL SEE Me." 



n 



THE INDISSOLUBLE LIFE 

TO THE GRADUATING CLASS, JUNE 24, 1894 

"Not after the law of a carnal commandment , but after the power of an endless 
life." Hebrews 7:16. 

It is necessary to see what these words mean in their con- 
nection, and from that force to go toward the great idea into 
which they open, and which the local application illustrates. 

The line stands in a paragraph whose purpose it is to 
show the supreme priesthood of Jesus Christ, that He is 
beyond and above the Levitical succession, that He is after 
the order of the great king-priest to whom even Abraham 
gave tithes, accepting his blessing as of a better than him- 
self; — that Christ's priesthood, single, complete, unchange- 
able, is the fulfilment and ideal which no high-priest of 
Israel had ever attained — offering one final sacrifice, without 
infirmity and perfected for evermore. 

And this paragraph (and chapter), which, however far 
away it may seem to us, came close to the daily thinking of 
the Hebrews who first read it, is part of a minute and 
patient and at last triumphant and rapturous argument, to 
show the devout Jews who in those apostolic days had 
accepted the true Messiah, that all they had loved and lived 
in of rubric and rite was not now despised but transcended ; 
— that they were not to be troubled because the venerable 
things of their past were changed; for they were fulfiled, not 
destroyed. 

In the Christ, all which they had held so intimate as the 
vessel and vehicle of a precious covenant and a common 
worship, was not only made good, but made better. 

The whole letter to these believing Israelites bases upon the 
comparison between the old and the new. Contrasts, general 
and special, are its whole structure. It is ruled by antithesis, 
and argues a fortiori, 

23 



Thus our text is an expression eminently characteristic of 
the argument into which it enters. Christ's place and office 
is not carnal, transient, legal: but mighty, quickening, 
enduring. 

Put compactly, here is a summary and a confronting — the 
Old against the New. Law on the one side, life on the other. 
The life does not deny the law, it surpasses it, taking a higher 
outlook and a wider reach. Law works inward from without. 
Life works outward from within. It is rim versus centre, — 
exterior restraint versus interior constraint. 

The word ' endless ' is much more exactly rendered, as in 
the margin, by the word indissoluble — a life essentially and 
uninterruptedly one in all its parts. 

The old dispensation which led up to the fullness and the 
fulfilment is set forth as rudimentary and preliminary. It is 
pedagogical. It is mechanical, not dynamic; and so, a 
moment later, our writer says, " for there is a disannulling of 
a foregoing commandment because of its weakness and 
unprofitableness ( for the law made nothing perfect), and a 
bringing in thereupon of a better hope, thro which we draw 
nigh unto God." 

I urge that this contrast between the temporary scope of 
that special commandment and the boundless scope of that 
supreme life, bases upon and illustrates a general truth of 
high importance. The contrast is representative of the per- 
manent conditions that divide punctiliousness from power, 
the narrowness of legality from the abundance of life. 

In all the things which we are saying the chief point is this, 
that there is all the difference between the artificiality of 
commandment and the spontaneity of life, that there is 
between Aaron and Christ. 

The law of all commandment is the law of criticism and 
repression, the power of all life is the law of appreciation and 
expansion. s 

The destructive opposes the constructive because it is per 
se inhibitive and cannot be creative. All precepts are good 

24 



only as they lead to principles. The literal rule is but a 
means to the end, right living. 

Law measures imperfection — life alone can repair and re- 
place. Law may introduce, but it never can complete. 

The Bible is not only a history but it also gives a philoso- 
phy of history, and it shows the degrees by which carnal rule 
is led on to spiritual power. The whole climate of Hebrews 
is changed from that of Leviticus. This was God's way — 
always is His way. While at first life so far as it can be is 
stated in the terms of law, at last law is to be transfigured in 
the terms of life. 

Painters and sculptors know rules and work with them: 
but what knowledge of their rules alone could make a Ru- 
bens or a Thorwaldsen ! The Idylls of the King are grammar 
plus Tennyson! A Lamia is prosody plus Keats! The Get- 
tysburg speech was history plus Lincoln! 

By law we learn to avoid death; but it is by the contact 
of the inspiration of a superior life that we learn to live. 

And these two dispensations, of law and of life, furnish 
forth two realms, an upper and a lower, in one of which we 
must all dwell. The upper includes the lower — life is not 
extra legal, but super legal. He who denies or despises law 
has not learned it, and must, if he would ever go up, go 
down again to the first principles and rudiments; but law 
cannot say the last word. For instance, marriage is a con- 
tract. That is a sorry marriage which forgets its contract, 
— that is also a sorry marriage which is only a contract. 
Carnal commandment must be underneath, but it must be 
underneath, — the "power of an indissoluble life." 

We may choose, and we must, whether we will live posi- 
tively or negatively. I mean, whether we shall be actively or 
passively good, whether we shall have that timid and 
hand-to-mouth behavior which is mainly concerned not to 
make mistakes, or that vital eagerness which is far more con- 
cerned to avoid making nothing! A man may be negatively 
good, in the sense that he does no mischief. Such an one 

25 



idolizes caution until it becomes impotence. His keeping of 
law is as if one for fear of going wrong were to lash himself 
to the sign-post at a four-corners; or as if a soldier were to 
save his powder for fear his gun might burst; or as if a sick 
man to assure himself against an error by the pharmacist 
were to swallow the prescription! 

Keeping law means more than eluding penalty. He is still 
coarse and carnal who does not perceive that sin and the 
consent thereto is the thing law indicates that seeing its 
naked abominableness, the soul may cry out for His help 
Who has the power of the indissoluble life, in Whom "the law 
of the spirit of life makes free from the law of sin and death." 
The differentiation of negative from positive goodness may 
be noted in contrasting the altitudes of the Siniatic Law and 
the teaching on the Mount, desert Arabia with fertile Gali- 
lee. Here we get right at the idea — the two ways of one 
God: but this introductory, that complete. We may not 
refuse either way, and we must be sure that the primer of 
a particular command is mastered and not skipped. Neither 
is it the end. It is much to avoid concrete evil, and so the 
ten words go on — " Thou shalt not " — it is goodness by 
exclusion. It is safe: but when Christ comes to translate 
precept into spirit, He gives goodness by inclusion, which is 
strength. He blesses the humble, suffering, restrained, eager 
for right, merciful, pure, pacific; in other words, He chooses 
and extols the life that begins within. In summing the law 
of Moses into two commandments, He made active love to 
God and man the whole result. Christ states actual goodness 
anew by showing how ten " thou shalt nots " equal two 
" thou shalts." Positive goodness is less verbal and more 
direct. Life advances by exchanging negatives for affirm- 
atives. By mastering rules we grow into relations, using the 
go-cart that we may walk without it. When the mechanical 
has become the natural, when effort has become spontaneity, 
when the crudeness of intention has become the second-na- 
ture of intuition, when one has learned to absorb the principle 

26 



that is the kernel of the rule, then the elocutionist has be- 
come the orator, the disciple the apostle. One noble con- 
formance is worth eight or ten avoidances. Much ' search- 
ing of scripture* is a search for vetos; over- pruning and not 
enough mulching. Doubtless too much of the education of 
children says, Don't, don't — instead of Do, do. The pri- 
mary lesson so long as needed (but no longer) must be to 
stop from error; but to proceed in right is the path of life. 
Preoccupation is protection — a higher interest supplants a 
lower. When a child can be made to laugh it already has 
quit crying. The way for a man to leave stinginess is to be- 
gin generosity. Presently Scrooge is no longer himself! It 
was because his goodness had been so far only negative 
— keeping the " shalt nots " — that the young man to 
whom Christ opened the positive and eternal life went away 
frowning! Meaning not to do harm is much less than de- 
termining to do good. The two words go deeper than the 
ten, and so at first seem harder to keep: but when drudgery 
has been overruled by vitality they prove easier. There is 
all the difference that lies between a balloon and a bird, in- 
flation and wings. 

We never do anything right well until we do it uncon- 
sciously. To be over-aware of self is to be awkward, or at 
least artificial. The senses are to be exercised by use until 
they cease to do ill by learning to do well. One must think 
of the target, not of the arrow; of the bird, not of the gun; of 
the listener, not of the song; of the soul, not of the sermon. 
Negative goodness is prim and timid, too self- concerned to 
dare aggression. It guards its rear instead of advancing its 
front. It adopts the tactics of McClellan rather than of 
Sheridan! And still the philosophy of making the provisional 
seem to be the permanent treats symptoms instead of deal- 
ing positively and radically with causes. Tonic is better 
than lancet. Build up the system and the disturber quits. 
Get health in and sickness goes out. Health does not recol- 
lect the body. It is when life loses its hold and power that 

27 



the patient has to fall back upon carnal commandment. A 
great deal of our religious living is at a dying rate, or at least 
feeble and sickly, because it forgets that the way to fight 
asphyxia is not by vacuum but by quantity of fresh air. 
There is a style of piety that is mainly pathological, speak- 
ing with the accent of invalidism, measuring mournful doses 
and adjusting hot-water bags. The power of the Living-One 
still as of old summons chronic debility and selfish neuras- 
thenia out of itself, " Arise, take up thy bed, walk "! 

It is the expulsive and propulsive dynamic of what is posi- 
tive that " gives power to the feeble, and to them that have 
no might increases strength." The locomotive gets up steam 
by going — the more speed the more draft. To warm a room 
one must close the window: but he must also light the fire; 
for to raise the temperature the stove is far more necessary 
than the thermometer. To get darkness out one does not 
use a broom but a lamp. Enter truth, exeunt lies. Enter 
liberty, exit bondage. Power is in the ratio of displacement. 
" Fire makes room for itself," say the Japanese. While 
dupes consent, tyrants rule them, — not longer. The Czar 
will experience Siberia just as soon as freedom shatters rotten 
beaurocracy. There will be a different Russia when there 
are different Russians. 

America will have better cities just so soon as it has better 
citizens. There will be a morally "Greater New York " when 
there are greater New Yorkers, — no earlier. Bad men can 
be kept out only by putting good men in. That spasmodic 
reform which stops half-way is illustrated in Christ's parable 
of the untenanted house. It was cleansed: but it was suf- 
fered to stand empty, and so it became again the kennel of 
demons. 

Not doing is undoing. To rest in negations of wrong, rather 
than to be zealous to affirm good, makes so big and fatal the 
bulk of sins of omission. " Ye did it not " may be the irre- 
vocable sentence! He who is either so irresolute or so proud 
as never to risk a mistake will never do anything. The 

28 



talent wrapped in a napkin and hid in a hole hurt no one: 
but it helped no one. No servant will enter into the joy of 
his Lord by proving that he never did much ill. 

The really upright life must be downright, — willing to 
blunder on, to stumble forward, to fall up. Real virtue is 
active, overt. It does and moves. It is measured by its 
momentum. A good citizen is not merely one who keeps 
out of the criminal court. It is of course something not to 
go to state's prison: but that cannot be the sum of patriot- 
ism. Certainly I hope that none of you will ever be hung: 
but I really hope more for you than that! A Christian is 
other than merely one who does not flagrantly violate the 
moral law. All the sanctions of respectability, ad infinitum 
or ad nauseam, cannot make a life of perpetuity. Absti- 
nences from evil are worth while, so far: but it is not the ill 
we let go but the good we hold fast that sizes us. 

The whole Jewish system established at once the value 
and the weakness of commandment. It was indispensable as 
an introduction; altogether deficient as a conclusion. It was 
the preceptor of adolescence — a " tutor until the time ap- 
pointed." The grandeur of Judaism was its original advance 
into precept; its decadence and stultification was in its re- 
fusal to see how law was intended to lead on to and into life. 
Coming to worship carnal rule it at last rejected the vital 
and perpetual newness of its great Consummator. It learned 
the letter of exclusiveness and refused the Spirit of inclusive- 
ness. It put the trellis for the vine. Thus it elevated the 
scribe above the prophet and dwindled to a retrospect. The 
Jews of our Lord's time had become high-protectionists in 
religion, and to exalt privileges denied stewardship, ignoring 
or hating all non-Jews. The Son of Man announcing the 
ripeness of a changed order, breaking down the partitions of 
severalty, declaring that the special could only be fulfilled in 
the universal, arraying the positive against the negative life, 
endured the inevitable contradiction of parchment and phy- 
lactery and signed the charter and covenant of emancipation 

29 



from these with the sign of the cross! The monastic spirit 
repeated the mistake of moribund Judaism, and in turn its 
carnal and perfunctory system went down before the power 
of wholeness of life. For it is the way of life to transcend 
circumstance not by caution but by character, not merely 
to quote a maxim and do a task, but to inspire an ideal and 
incarnate its joy. This is the freedom of the soul which per- 
ceives the spiritual goal of instances and rubric, and (never 
disdaining their concrete value) holds them always as non- 
finalities. So does the flood-tide first follow, then fill, and 
then with its broad sway cover, the little indentations of its 
estuaries. Then the boats go wide and free that at low-ebb 
must strictly heed the channel. 

Ramadan, or Lent, or Sunday, — think how these are 
kept merely by abstention, instead of by a typical and sac- 
ramental substitution of works of love and mercy. If the 
Lord's day were once used by the alleged followers of Christ 
in His way, in helping the hungry and heartening the dis- 
tressed, — even if sleek congregations upon cushioned seats 
sang fewer lyrics in good-natured praise of the cross, — had 
less entertainment in the way of 'sacred rhetoric' with all 
the week for anti-climax — that were to keep the day holy. 
Long ago Isaiah described the fast God has chosen. 

The way we keep the fourth commandment is a speci- 
men of our conception of the others — not doing this and 
that. It irritates our self-complacency to be told that clean 
linen and general inertia are only negative virtues and that 
it is the fulness of the law to " do good on the Sabbath." We 
are semi-Jewish yet in our Christianity ! It is vain for us 
to hope to understand Christ by mere ceremony and rite. 
He is the pattern of an affirmative and constructive life. 
The old priesthood offered something else: but He offered 
Himself. That offering of self is our only availing answer 
to His call Who said that the way to find life is to lose it. 
He does not now preach economy: but great investment ! It 
is the engineer's business to burn coal, not to save it ! 

30 



This whole and indissoluble book is a book of positive 
and so of profound theories of life. It offers to supplant 
the vagueness and barrenness of mere negations by invinci- 
ble realities. It gives us law as a base of operations. It 
teaches us to answer the allegations of doubt by the power 
of Christ. We are to put off the old man by putting on the 
new, to cease to do evil by learning to do well. Might of 
spirit does not come by carnal measurements. Doubt dies 
by deed. It is answered by fidelities, not disputations. It 
is not what we controvert, but what we demonstrate, that 
tells. No party and no person is long tolerated whose only 
outfit is a grievance. Non credo makes few converts. Trust 
alone can vanquish distrust and "overcome evil with good." 
The distinction of all conquering greatness is its displacement 
of shabby apologizing by daring aggressions. It is in this 
direction that Phillips Brooks so wisely noted, "how many 
more resolutions to do right are kept than resolutions not 
to do wrong." Better be strenuous for one truth than 
against ten lies ! In chess or in war defensive tactics may 
postpone defeat, but only offensive tactics win the game. 

When in Rio harbor our Admiral manned the guns of the 
Detroit and said, / will act — he defended American non- 
combatants and British too, and all Saxons said Amen! 
Do your duty and take the risks. To live is much more 
than merely not to die ! 

" HERE LIES ONE WHO NEVER DID MUCH HARM." 

Who wants that for his epitaph ? But if mortuary mar- 
ble were less diplomatic how often this negative legend 
would summarize a nominal life ! Webster on his last 
couch said, " I still live." Someone attempted to repeat his 
word, and got so near as to make it, " / ain't dead yet ." 
There is a difference! 

Abandon is the dynamic before which prudentialities 
shrivel. Personal will alone can rouse the wills of others. 

At the siege of Port Hudson, in May '63, when the invest- 

31 



ment had been made complete and the lines were almost 
within talking distance, the Rebels had at one point erected 
a powerful redoubt, crowned with rifled cannon and crowded 
with sharpshooters. The Federal soldiers dubbed the spot 
Fort Infernal. It silenced the works in its immediate front 
and made the trenches deadly. Its vomit of iron seemed as 
if set with a hair-trigger. On the evening of July 6th Gen- 
eral Banks sent for the officers commanding the opposed 
Union front. He sharply criticised the apparent inaction of 
the assailants, and to the reply of Col. Berrien that half his 
guns were dismounted and the redoubt impregnable, the 
General gave orders that at nine the next morning, at what- 
ever cost of life, the battery should be stormed. " It shall 
be done," replied the Colonel, his bronzed cheek burning 
under the implied rebuke as he saluted and turned away 
to consult with his subordinate officers. With one voice 
they pronounced the attack hopeless and declared that the 
men would not obey a command that meant the annihila- 
tion of their columns. Sternly the Colonel answered them 
all: "Gentlemen, the attack will be made if I make it 
alone!" 

At half-past eight of the 7th of July, the troops mustered 
close in the trenches stood gloomy and unresponsive to the 
words of their commander, as with a few words to each 
company he inspected the line. Watch in hand he waited 
the moment, and as the finger marked nine, with sword in 
hand he leaped to the parapet. " Forward I " A tremor 
fluttered down the front: but they remained irresolute — 
and there their Colonel, the lead hornets swarming about 
him. "Forward! Charge!" Heads went down, dark 
shame flushed the faces, yet they stayed. " Cover your 
carcasses, cowards — I will storm the battery!" About 
face and alone! Twelve steps, and over the breastworks 
went Color-sergeant Whittaker, and there were two ! A sword, 
a flag, and the cannon gouging the earth about them to left, 
to right, the sleet of death pitiless ! Madmen, shoulder to 
32 



shoulder! The fire slackened, heads peered over parapet 
and bastion, gazing at the two. Then the significance of it 
dawned on the beholders, and alike from Unionists and 
Rebels there went up a wild Saxon cheer. It was life! Out 
of the trenches and over the earthworks came the regiment, 
wild with the passion to do — tho doing were dying. On 
and over and in! Steel to steel, soul to soul, — they would 
have stormed Hell! 

No one remembered how, but it was done, and as the 
grimy remnant gathered about the shredded flag struck into 
the parapet, they heard the faint voice of their wounded 
Colonel: " Well, boys, you came, after all! " 

Fort Infernal had fallen, and with it Port Hudson. 

Men of the Class of '94 : 

You stand here now with sealed orders as to where you 
are to live and labor : but the whereby and whereunto, this 
text taken to heart makes an open secret. " KaTa 8wu/uv ^? 
d/caTaAvTov " — Power, Life, Indivisibility — what words are 
these to heed as you go! Carrying love in your hearts for 
the fair Mother who has done more for you than you now 
can guess, may you vindicate and honor her by your positive 
deeds. Acta non verba ! In the ever-growing library of 
memory cherish these four volumes, today nearing the last 
paragraph, and of which the whole sum is this: " Quit you 
like men, be strong in the Lord and in the power of His 
might." " If your virtues do not go forth of you, 't were 
all alike as if you had them not." Submit your souls to 
Him Who can evoke your latent capabilities as the miracle 
of irrigation makes the Arizona deserts into gardens. 

Let fidelity to your inmost natures add your lives to that 
phalanx of light which is turning the battle to the gates. 

The sixteen- year old boy who against a field of expert 
men won recently a great bicycle race, said a thing worth 
remembering. He was eagerly questioned as to how he did 
it. "I took the best gait that I thought I could maintain 

33 



for the twenty miles, and kept it up just the^same from 
start to finish. I did not look at any one, but just held my 
eyes on the ground ahead of my wheel and kept up my 
gait." There were famous sprinters competing with him, 
but he did not sprint. They were watching others to see 
what they were doing, but he watched none but himself. 
That is the moral route by which souls reach the goal! 

God free you from sordid seductions, from base appetite, 
from the paltry ambitions of the many, and number all of 
you with the glorious few who refuse the sham goodness of 
conventionality for the tasks and triumphs of the more ex- 
cellent way. God fulfill for you every desire of goodness 
and every work of faith with power. May your souls realize 
themselves in service, " Like perfect music unto perfect 
words," — and so may you attain the crown of life! 



34 



RADICAL AND CONSERVATIVE 

TO THE GRADUATING CLASS, JUNE 23, 1895 

Every scribe who hath been made a disciple unto the kingdom of Heaven, is like 
unto a man that is a householder, who bringeth forth out of his treasure 
things new and old. Matthew 13 :52. 

Right upon the utterance of several notable parables, 
Christ turned to His disciples, asking them: "Have ye 
understood ? " And at once to that close question He 
added the words which illustrate how much He meant by 
really understanding. Therein He described the width and 
abundance of His own instructions, and so showed what in 
his degree every true teacher must be. 

He would have all disciples learn to be such teachers, 
bringing them by expectant and eager attention to the sweep 
and search of His word and work, into the open secret of 
His method and His purpose. He teaches, as also He rules, 
by the way both of continuity and of increase. To Him, 
and in Him, time and its tenses are not fragmentary, and 
truth is a unit both constant and augmenting. 

All that this keeper of His house brings forth, (throws 
forth — swiftly, determinedly) — out of His abundant the- 
saurus, or treasury, is precious. There is no rubbish there, 
no moth-fret nor rust. Thence we are to accept and adopt 
" things new and old." What we now affirm and urge is 
the equal oldness and newness of the teachings of Christ. 
He certainly made good this declaration in both argument 
and accent. 

The words of this Instructor of time were as emphatic 
and sedate as Mt. Horeb, and as fresh as the balsamed 
winds that blew out of Gilead to ruffle the mirror of the 
Galilee; as old as the light and as new as the morning. 

So it came that they who had found the soul and substance 
of elder revelation, welcomed gladly His authentic message, 

35 



and that unsophisticated every-day men trusted Him as an 
authoritative interpreter of those primary problems which 
lie near to plain hearts. So also those who could only value 
quotation marks, who had no insight of that which lay back 
of ceremonial and rubric, who idolized idioms and had lost 
the idea, failed to comprehend this Scribe of the Spirit and 
the divine truth-kingdom He announced. 

Whoever, then, held to Christ Himself, and pressed past 
the objections of unfaith and semi-faith, found Him deeper 
than the oldest words of men, brighter than the newest. It 
is the same now. 

The whole story of that Wisdom Incarnate establishes our 
text. It was the chord in which His entire testimony was set. 

And I go on to say that our Lord's illumination of " things 
new and old " was not an exception, but rather a specimen 
of all the normal and constant self-manifestation of God. 

The material of truth is changeless, its form is never twice 
alike. Christ here asserts the variety in its unity. One 
treasury, many things. Let us open wide our minds. This 
heavenly and kingly Scribe is wiser than our half-sight, and 
quietly rebukes that mental attitude which looks only in one 
direction, whether that be backward or forward. For he 
who but considers the East, equally with him who but con- 
siders the West, ignores half of the total day. 

Christ summons us to live under a whole sky. In Him 
and in His words, and in those who best know and most re- 
semble Him, the past and the present are held not in opposi- 
tion but in sympathy. 

The partial is the easier and the feebler. The sturdier 
and more genial way loves to discover the combination, the 
union, the vital identity of what has been done with what is 
doing now. For, just as every June is both a result and a 
cause, the child of an elder and the mother of a junior sum- 
mer, so in all the spirit's life the past and the present are 
blended in Him Who has " neither beginning of days nor end 
of years." 
36 



Man in his obstinate fallibility easily lapses into one or 
the other of two equally incomplete frames of mind — living 
on the one hand only in what is old, and on the other hand 
only in what is new. 

Each mistake is a mistake not only of one-sidedness but of 
outsidedness — the mistake of identifying the eternal sub- 
stance with its transient appearance, of preferring accident 
above essence, fashion above fact. 

These opposite moods are of course largely temperamental: 
but it is the business of a rational soul to overcome predis- 
position and bias, and to get rid of its stifTneckedness by 
realizing that man's head is not set on a pedestal but on a 
pivot ! 

Some minds are eager for any change, and some are angry 
at any. The one is born senile, and the other dies puerile. 
Each of these classes has its own dislike, whether muttered 
or mumb, to the under-thought, the wide comprehension of 
our text. One secretly wishes that Christ had spoken only 
" things old," and the other would have even from Him only 
" things new." One frustrates truth of its eternal summits 
of ozone and outlook, the other would ignore its permanent 
foundation and base. But every mountain that has heights 
has also depths. Altitude measures both ways. 

The man who loves the old only as old, and the man who 
seeks the new only as new — each thinks with but one brain- 
lobe. He whose discipline is unto the wide kingdom of 
Heaven, loves what is true whether it seems old or new, — 
loves it because it is always both old and new. 

There are two words which in current and somewhat 
careless fashion are made the class-titles of these alternative 
habits of mind, — the words Radical and Conservative. 
Nothing can be more deplorable than to fall entirely under 
either category, whichsoever it be; for either, by itself, is 
segmental. 

Conservative means preservative. Under this title range 
all those who dread and repel change, who are angered by 

37 



the unexpected and tormented by agitation. The Conser- 
vative hoards decisions and loves only what is gradual and 
guaranteed. Custom and continuity are his comfort, and he 
is apt to look with a stony face upon the unconventional. 
An ounce of caution is worth to him a ton of daring. Sud- 
den and precipitous men, who would crowd all tenses into 
the present, who delight in speed and scorn the steam-guage 
and the escape- valve, who ( as Lowell said) " must see the 
world saved before night," are his abhorrence, and these in 
turn renounce the Conservative as impossible, coagulated, 
obsolescent ! 

But whether the Conservative is a dullard and dotard or 
a seer and safeguard, rests upon his particular scope and 
motive. For to test one time by all times, to resist swift- 
ness in the interest of strength, to weigh secure axioms 
against rash importunities — this is wisdom, and he who has 
it saves the future, postponing the unripe today that he may 
secure the bountiful tomorrow. The true Conservative 
declines both green apples and rotten. The false Conserva- 
tive, if he marches at all, marches backward. He is crabbed 
and hard-shelled. He is an antiquary and medievalist. He 
adores inertia and is an incorrigible temporizer. " His 
strength is to sit still." His forte is negation. He worships 
in a pantheon of mummies. To him the present is but a 
pile of exhausted slag, and history is not a nursery but a 
graveyard. He likes his manna pickled. Experience is 
sacred to him as a means wherewith to rebuke hope. He 
can only accept the prophecies that were long ago fulfilled 
and the miracles that are memories. The best days are 
past. He believes only memoriter, and maxims are his 
finality. 

The Radical is the man who would go to the root. The 
tops of things do not satisfy him. His watchword is Thoro. 
He is assertive, aggressive, intense, sweeping. He nails a 
besom at his mast-head. He does not add precedents, and 
he forswears formulas. He prefers any innovation rather 

38 



than to endure mortmain. Yeast is his element. He rides 
bare-backed revolution. He wields the iconoclast's hammer, 
and loves axe and plow and the rubbish-searching flame. 

Routine men, who adore yellow parchment and pale rub- 
rications and chancery-tape and all that is canonical, resent 
the Radical as an intruder, an impracticable, and a fanatic. 

But whether the Radical is a sheer destroyer or a sublime 
reformer depends upon whether he too is farsighted or near- 
sighted, upon whether mere destruction or reconstruction is 
his ultimate goal. There is a crude and cruel temper whose 
whole passion it is not to extend boundaries but to trample 
them, whose essence is lawless and anarchic. Upon what- 
ever plane of theory of affairs, he who thinks hard without 
thinking far, or moves fast but not firmly, is a danger and 
may become a disaster. 

No classification of men is ever exhaustively accurate. No 
man falls exactly within a single category. But the instance 
of the partisan who disdains experience, who renounces the 
sequence of causes, whose prospect scorns retrospect, who 
mistakes a fancy for a revelation, who thinks his dividend 
can decree its own divisor, who falls with hysterical rapture 
upon the neck of " each new-hatched, unfledged comrade," — 
he will occur under a hundred names. He has his use as a 
scourge and a warning — the false Radical, who does not go 
to the root. 

Of the radicalism of wild excess, clashing with the conser- 
vatism of stupid lethargy, the France of just a century ago 
was a sufficient instance,— the collision of two collossal 
madnesses ! 

This then remains; that either type of opinion and 
method, prevailing in isolation, emphasizes one, and but one, 
of the two necessary complementary phases of a full human 
activity. Man is to look fore and aft. The best guns are 
turreted and command both bow and stern. One can wisely 
neglect neither the synthesis that groups time into unity — 
" broadening down from precedent to precedent," — nor the 



analysis which subjects all phases, customs, statutes, consti- 
tutions, to reinvestigation. 

The wild Radical puts out his torch at midnight; the 
blind Conservative shakes his torch in the face of the noon : 
but he who has disclaimed infallibility goes, at whatever 
hour, by the best light that hour offers. There they sit, in 
senates or on thrones, robed in the livery of officialism or 
brain-bound with hoops of gem-set gold, waiting, or mutter- 
ing " nothing can be done," the " everlasting No," the non 
possumus of imbecility. History puts them into its museums 
of fossils. George III. may stand for a specimen, or you 
may take the impotent indecision of James Buchanan. And 
there too they rush, frantic, screaming that everything must 
be done at once! — your Wilkes, Dantons, Garrisons. 

But now and then an epoch advances which combines 
both moods. It becomes crystalline and effective. The 
scarce and ambidextrous man stands up to say, " Something 
can be done now, if not everything, and what can be done, 
shall be." With this man comes an era. In him the old 
order changes, as the dried leaves fall before the outpushing 
buds while their tree lives and expands. Seeing both possi- 
ble harms, reckoning with both the obstacles and the helps, 
enduring or daring but never shirking, this man waits with 
a patience that is not delay, and works with a sureness that 
is not haste. The really large one lays the axe to the root, 
that he may conserve the truths blighted under the rank 
shadow of a lie; and he also holds back impetuosity, " lest 
with the tares it pull up the wheat also." 

In writing upon the Long Parliament, Macaulay has a 
terse and balanced paragraph upon this matter, and he con- 
cludes: "In the sentiments of both classes there is some- 
thing to approve. But, of both, the best specimens will be 
found not far from the common frontier." 

Truly it is not in the frigid zone nor the torrid, but in the 
temperate, that the greatest events issue and endure. But, 
that being said, it is not for the dawdlers and sybarites to 
40 



estimate the stern resolve of an Elijah fronting Jezebel, of 
Elisabeth's son denouncing Herodias, of Savonarola, and 
Beza, and Knox, and Sam Adams, and Phillips, and Sum- 
ner. Time-servers cannot realize the indelible influences of 
the commonwealth of Cromwell, nor can tuft-hunters per- 
ceive that he was England's truest king. When such dep- 
uty-sheriffs of Almighty God utter their summons let men 
heed. " So shall He startle many nations." " Kings shall 
shut their mouth at Him." These radicals are conservative 
too, tho in a way no small calipers can measure. But in 
a range far above these stand the calm, comprehensive souls, 
who know how to work while waiting and wait while work- 
ing, and their appealing eyes look past the hour and the event 
for the verdict of God. Plato and Tacitus and the name- 
less writer of the book of Job stand there. There are Angelo 
and Kepler. There, silent, tender, time-abiding, upon a ped- 
estal cut from the core of things, which no man manufac- 
tured and no man can mar, Lincoln stands. The spherical 
man is he who beyond the symbol seeks the essence, and who 
will have that, cost how it may, and will at any cost keep it. 

Supreme herein is He upon whose lips absolute righteous- 
ness and everlasting peace kissed each other, and to Him — 
whether we would dare or endure, pity or denounce, cut 
down or build up, — to Him we turn for the complete ex- 
ample of the symmetrical life, the life in which all the traits 
of nobility are coordinate and entire, in which wisdom is not 
cold nor zeal roiled. Whosoever would follow Him must be 
a manifold man, Conservative and Radical in one. 

Under the domain and dominion of Christ, the old and 
the new, instead of warring, wed. Judgment replaces, and 
enthusiasm restores. 

The two terms we are discussing are not absolute, but rel- 
ative. That is only a so-called conservatism, not really 
such, which mistakes routine associations for the truth itself, 
and identifies the treasure with the earthen vessel, preferring 
an empty ark to a living Messiah. 

41 



The true conserver is a Radical in desiring to keep the 
real thing. The perennial second commandment is dearer 
to him than any transient device. Form is to him the utility 
and life alone is holy. He would preserve what is older than 
all form in any form that will hold it, and would rather have 
a quart of truth in a square cup than a pint of truth in a 
round one. Christ was such. His balance was far super- 
human. He whipped the traffickers from the temple, yet 
predicted that temple's overthrow. He rebuked petrified 
tradition while declaring, " I came not to destroy but to ful- 
fill." To the Pharisees He seemed a rash leveller, to the 
Herodians a futile moralist. His very disciples often wanted 
to hasten or to restrain Him: but He would neither hurry 
nor delay. 

He came to ' set men at variance,' to ' kindle a fire,' to 
' send a sword,' to say, " every plant that My Father hath 
not planted shall be rooted up," " he that is not for us is 
against us " : but, and also, He considered the bruised reed- 
pen, and the smouldering flax-wick, the little ones, the lost 
sheep, and turning pride upside down He put in the beati- 
tudes a premium upon what the world despises, and He 
said, " he that is not against us is on our part." Evolution 
and revolution wrought together. Positive yet patient, 
daring yet cautious, never hedging and never hasting, He 
was outwardly all that men did not expect and would not 
comprehend, and inwardly all that they needed. While he 
never snarled nor sneered, He never mitigated His meaning 
nor receded from his program. 

He affirmed principles and left them to work out their ap- 
plications. He was too slow for some and too swift for others 
— bi-partisanship scouted Him. He was so supreme that no 
one measured Him. President Hyde well says: "The aver- 
age good man is equally at war with the bad man who is 
below him and the progressively good man who is above 
him. The reformer and thecriminal are about equally ob- 
noxious to the man of average goodness and intelligence. 

42 



The prophets and the betrayers are equally odious and pro- 
miscuously stoned. The Saviour is crucified between two 
thieves." 

Still the Church is but semi-christian in its emancipation 
from what is seen and temporary. It still but begins to 
know its mission as Christ's ideal of society. We fail to see 
that the husk is precious only for the kernel's sake, and that 
when the wheat is gone what is left is but straw and chaff. 
The old is good while it covers the new; after that it is a 
dry pod. 

John the Baptist was one mighty Radical who illustrated 
the law that they who wield sharp tools must feel them: but 
that axe of his laid to the upas-tree of hollow words was the 
reconstructive agent the time was most in need of, and his 
lonely voice was the herald of Israel's King. 

Every great preserver is called a deformer till he is gone. 
Men are prone to garnish the sepulchres of their prophets 
with epitaphs: but the prophets with epithets. The many 
feel more secure when those who compel them to think are 
under a good-sized slab! 

It remains for us, if we would neither tear nor raffle this 
seamless text, to hold to the fluidity of God's purpose and 
providence, and to see the sacredness of all its conduits, 
whether present or past. They are neither identical nor in- 
dependent. Truth is perennial, and we hold what we have 
of it both as the heirs of our parents and as the trustees of 
our children. 

That age is most important which does the most to em- 
phasize what is of permanent importance. The wise man 
perceives both what is permanent and what is progressive, 
neither unduly preponderating. The new and the old do 
not impeach one another. Origins, means, and ends — all 
are coordinate. Revelation is a process by which what is 
vital and seminal constantly adapts and enlarges its new ex- 
pressions. Finality is death, and prejudice the rigor mortis. 

1 Providence unfolds the Book.' It is not a kaleidoscope 

43 



for a toy, but a telescope for a tool, and it looks deeper than 
any of us is aware. 

Christ planted a thousand seeds that now are forests. 
Under that Argus-eyed, Atlas-shouldered, Briareus-handed 
Leader both the intensive and the extensive life find scope. 
Under that calm and conquering dominion we are not to be 
terrified at ideas that surpass and supersede our inherited 
schemes. One could not, for instance, crowd our modern 
and still tentative conception of missionary duty into the 
ideals of the eighteenth century. 

Slavery, feudalism, the serfdom of one sex, have felt the 
touch of Christ's sceptre; and the cowardice of wealth, as 
the envy of want — all usages without reason, are yet to own 
His ever-germinal Kingdom. 

We are to imitate fidelity, not fashions. As our forbears 
did, so must we, — tell what we learn of God in our own 
words! We must mint our own coin-current. We are not 
invited to repeat the wile of the Gibeonites, and provide 
ourselves with what is dry and mouldy! Miracles are not 
repeated; greater ones are wrought. He who accustoms 
himself to God's Spirit finds the old renewed in larger won- 
ders. God's latency is all in all. He does not exhaust. 
Life is incessant innovation. It is only when one stops go- 
ing that his horizon and perspectives no longer change. 
" Tempora non animum " — " They change their skies but 
not their souls who traverse the ocean." New seas are 
sailed under new stars. It is not the familiar scene but the 
intimate companion that makes life's journey serene. If 
you are scholars of the great Teacher, He will give you both 
review lessons and advance, and outgrowing your garments 
you will find that your apprehension of today will not fit 
you tomorrow, certainly not the day after tomorrow. Lot's 
wife for a parable! 

We are put into a day that forces us upon God. Much 
does our Lord's word apply to our very time. It is a strong 
detergent to " every disciple unto the kingdom of Heaven." 

44 



The giant is out of the bottle! The era of analysis is not 
accidental, it is providential. Man needed it. The Church 
needed it. God awakens us from the " opiate of usage." It 
is a revival. The ages in which the status is unchanged are 
wintry ages. In scholarship, legislation, society, religion, 
the motionless times are the moribund. Life must either be 
moribund or more abundant! 

A time like this of ours is deplored by those who dread 
any change and adored by those who love all change: but, 
if sane, we will neither neglect nor abuse its disciplines. We 
may neither surrender to every challenge nor reject every 
claim. Truth is not shaken by either assault or doubt. We 
can do nothing against it. Magna et prevelabit — spite of 
harsh attack or feeble defense. 

Just as to a man walking too fast upon a city's crowded 
sidewalk, every other man is too slow, and to a man walking 
too slowly every other man is too fast, so the pace of the 
world is a limitation which we can somewhat affect, but to 
which, to affect it, we must somewhat conform. We are to 
advance, if effectively, neither laggardly nor too fast. We 
are to have new things and old, old things and new. The 
web if unfolded will show that every true age has pressed 
home new woof upon the old warp. We cannot do more than 
to utter our own convictions, and we may not dare do less, 
both aggressive and circumspect, neither timid nor tumid. 

The processes of readjustment compel the processes of 
restatement, and both these processes come often with 
clamor and always with pain: but only those wring their 
hands whose assurances are outside of God. There are 
half-men, who only see one way, and there are ages domi- 
nated by such men that are only half-ages: but whole men 
and whole ages look both ways, and sailing by North Star or 
Southern Cross are piloted by Him Who sees all and will 
show all. Holding to Him the genuine soul will not shiver 
nor shrink. 

What we all need is less anxiety over precedent and more 

45 



confidence in God. In the trust that history is prophecy, 
that God is here, that He still steers the world, the deep 
seers of our century have spoken. " In Memoriam " voices 
it. Whittier is the bard of " that great law which makes 
the past time serve today.' ' 

" Whate'r of good the old time had 

Is living still. • * # 
God works in all things. All obey 
His first propulsions from the night. 
Ho, wake and watch! The world is grey 

With morning light." 

No, " this is not our rest," for body or mind. We are in 
transitu. Our souls are under marching orders and lodge in 
tents. 

Then what this word of Christ should fix in us is, that 
truth is eternally young. Revelation, nature, man, provi- 
dence, yield perpetual increase. The encyclopedia of knowl- 
edge must be supplemented with annual volumes. 

Pondering the inexhaustibleness of the treasures of God 
hid in Christ, richer, deeper, wider, with every practical test 
of them, a truly reverent philosophy of the world as His 
must take on continually grander proportions, and must 
speak with ever-mightier convictions and ever-better argu- 
ments. 

No true science remains stationary. Geology, chemistry, 
astronomy, biology, even history, — what changes of method 
and result have these undergone in three generations! But 
the objects have not changed, nor have the necessary mathe- 
matics of thought wherewith we work. 

World and event prove Christ the Interpreter of time and 
eternity. The more He does the more He both confirms and 
expands. His words are not Dead Seas, but wells of living 
water. The " Heir of all things," His latest words are His 
largest. Who shall debar His illimitable and crescent sway 
upon Whom all converges and from Whom all radiates, the 
old and the new blending in His integrity ? 
46 



Men of the Class of '95 1 

This ' commencement ' is an ending; but far more is it a 
beginning. Poetic fitness, as well as convenience, long ago 
transferred it from the autumn of the college year to the 
summer. Your real curriculum is not behind you, but 
before. 

You are now to translate and parse that " Sunt quos 
curriculo pulverem Olympicum Collegisse juvat." The 
Olympic dust is yonder. The college has been but your 
introduction to the ' collegisse." You are whirling up to 
the line, and are all but ready for the word. Let me add my 
voice to the sending cheer. 

When you come panting and straining to the finish — 
" the goal nicely- avoided by the glowing wheels, and the 
noble palm " — the voices that shout " Well done! " will not 
sound here ! In that eternal commencement, having "fin- 
ished your course with joy," may it be true of you each and 
all, in a far deeper sense than blithe Horace ever considered, 
— " evehit ad Deos I " Bethink yourselves that you are 
charioteers — " a Oearpov to the universe and to angels." I 
am sure that you would admonish the new-fledged Sopho- 
mores here, who are kindly translating my little Latin to the 
maidens beside them — (" junctaeque Nymphis gratiae 
decentes " ) — to bestir themselves even already for that 
third summer hence when they too shall gather taut the 
reins for their life race. 

Good-bys are always trite : but not the less are they solemn. 
Already, to two of your company — to Frank Burrowes, 
who died in September, '93, and to John R. Myers, jr., who 
died in July, '94, — you have said the irrevocable farewell. 
Forty-six men began the work of your class four years ago; 
now twenty-nine complete the roll. Never, after this week, 
will so many of you gather under one roof ! In groups you 
will return to the hillside of your common love: but little by 
little your ranks will gather closer, until, perhaps in 1955, 
you will hold your last class meeting — of one ! He will 

47 



come, the relic of you all. He will ride up the hill he caii 
then no longer climb. He will, with some young guide not 
to be born for thirty years yet, observe the stately new 
buildings and people the old with you and your comrades 
of the moss-grown nineteenth century. Perhaps he will say 
a kindly word at the mound where one shall then be resting 
who for three years, under whatever college vicissitudes, 
was a good friend of '95. He will look out upon the lovely 
slopes and beyond the curving hills, the boys will gather in 
their caps and gowns and cheer, — 

Boom Rah ! Boom Rah I Who is he ? 

Vive La ! Vive La ! XCV ! 
— and then — he will go down into the valley ! 

But between this and that day work lies — your real 
standing is to be registered. It is a grand time to live ! 
Live boldly ! We shall watch you from this signal station. 
You will be welcomed back, with your honors new and old. 
The white spire and its far-flashing point will guide you 
from afar. The bell will greet you. The old well will bub- 
ble for you. You will send along your boys for the nine- 
teen- twenties. All good to you in the strenuous years upon 
which you enter ! Be Christ's men ! Accept every one of 
you His name and His guerdon of self-sacrifice ; and grad- 
uate at last, " having obtained the good degree," and all of 
you with high honor ! 



48 



THE REVELATIONS OF RESERVE 

TO THE GRADUATING CLASS, JUNE 21, 1896 

/ have yet many things to say unto you; but ye can not bear them now. 

— John 12:16. 

This was said in that upper room and on that passion- 
night when more tenderly and more fully than ever before 
our Lord opened His heart to the eleven who loved Him. 
He sought thus to prepare them for the experiences so new, 
so near, and still so incomprehensible. But His words even 
then were not so much an explanation as an embrace. We 
are always furnished best for our next steps by personal love 
to our Leader, rather than by vision of the way. 

Too much foreknowledge would baffle and daunt us. Each 
page of instruction has its back to the page beyond. God's 
books are printed leaf by leaf — continuous sense and con- 
stant surprise await each turn. Progress and reserve go to- 
gether. Revelation, which is an unended and an endless pro- 
cess, accommodates itself to immaturity by its hidings of 
both grace and power. " By divers portions and in divers 
manners " God prepared the way by the prophets and " in 
the fulness of time " declared His Son. He developed His 
meaning as rapidly as it could be at all accepted. And when 
the Christ was made manifest, even to those nearest Him, 
and to them because nearest, " He spake the Word as they 
were able to bear it." Revelation were wasted were there 
not readiness for it. Growth is the only method of God that 
we know, and His omniscience waits upon human capacity 
so that curiosity shall neither be tantalized or drowned. 
Waiting is not delay, but preparation. The withholding is 
full of tender promise. Just because all is not given at once 
we are sure there will be more. What we can bear we shall 
hear. Each testimony, to the end, is to be shown in " its 
own times." God's motherliness meets our spiritual diges- 

49 



tion with food convenient, and neither offering that which is 
unripe nor that for which we are unready, makes distinction 
between babe's milk and man's meat. Eye teeth come 
earlier ; wisdom teeth later. We do not expect a " Clark 
prize " exhibition from Freshmen ; but four years from now 
we shall expect from you more than that. Because living is 
learning, you will all outgrow yourselves many times before 
Earth's school is over. 

The guardian must await the competency of his ward, 
and the heir must be under tutors and governors while his 
nonage lasts. That possession without preparation may be 
a mortal damage is shown by the many wrecks of those who 
come into a great estate without experience of values and 
with undisciplined wills. God graduates his demands to our 
aptitudes, and that we may not be overborne He puts 
primer before grammar, and syntax before prosody. He 
guages the strain to match the muscle, and does not impose 
upon adolescence either the reflections or the responsibilities 
of full manhood. He does not expect the child to speak as 
a man, nor the man to think as a child. 

Christ's tuition in Galilee was a signal instance of divine 
discipline. Nazareth was no great place; but there the boy 
Jesus learned obedience, and so came to a stature of soul to 
endure the gaze of a nation and the apparent ignominy of a 
Roman cross! There He learned to teach men as they were 
able to receive and to temper the light to the vision. 

Or take this Book. How part led on to part! How its 
story marches! What an " increasing purpose " it registers! 
How the relative moves toward the absolute! By provisional 
stages and by steady advances — from Exodus to Nehemiah 
— it covers eleven hundred years. Then the "four cen- 
turies of silence," then Bethlehem. Again from the Ascen- 
sion sixty years more before the beloved disciple laid down 
his pen, with " Many other things did Jesus which are not 
written." It is a cumulative record, growing as now in 
finest lithography the print takes new lines and tints from 
50 



successive stones. Each century added its own impression. 
What a witness is this Book whose study has formed a 
strong component part of your curriculum, to the manner as 
well as the matter of providential truth! As literature it is 
august, but as an evidence of God's pedagogic way it is 
sublime. He has but an illiberal education who has not 
been taught in these Scriptures the fundamental philosophy 
of history. The evolution of redemption is the highest ap- 
peal to the patience of hope, and the deepest assurance that 
" of the increase of His government there shall be no end." 

What a surrender it is to fail to recognize that the divine 
is always the interhuman, and to estimate the times of the 
Judges by the times of the Evangelists — to speak as if 
Jacob could have understood Paul! Each age was an ad- 
vance. Abraham was of one period, Moses of another; but 
Moses, shepherd tho he was, could not have written the 
Twenty-third Psalm. David could not have penned the 
fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, nor the " Songs of Degrees." 
Jeremiah could not have anticipated the Annunciation. 
Unity throout, but of will, not wisdom. These holy men 
spake as they were moved. The dates are not on the writ- 
ings, but in them, God having ever provided " some better 
things." Even Paul saw " in part." He did not dream of 
the modern geography and of modern missions. He was not 
shown the territorial reach, the new politics of all these 
centuries, just as we now do not guess the new society that 
Christ has in mind, nor the slow and stormy times thro 
which it shall be brought in. But He who wove the facts 
here set down, and who has overcome thus far, is the same 
forever in saying: " I have yet many things to say unto you, 
but ye cannot bear them now." 

Level to the topmost comprehension of each time, meet- 
ing each occasion, always opportune, weaving no anti-climax, 
always with both dramatic unity and dramatic movement, 
the providential truth is given, link by link, and the Word, 
mortising each stone into the arch, perfects the whole by 

51 



that which every part suppHeth. The symmetry is vital, 
not mechanical. With the divine oversight and control 
there is no variableness. The embryo and the birth alike 
are His. 

Things that were inscrutable to the first disciples are 
taught in our infant classes. Christ trusted them with ideas 
as fast as He could, and as it was, they were in constant 
amazement. He was wont to say, " If ye can hear it," — 
" He that hath ears." How fast events moved from that 
Passover to the Pentecost. What pregnant suspense and 
with what unimagined issues! 

After that cloud-burst of grace and on thro that genera- 
tion there runs a steady crescendo of spiritual comprehen- 
sion, the words being confirmed in signs following. Inspira- 
tion accommodates itself to the soul as incarnation accom- 
modated itself. Each is full, neither is final. Nothing is 
final with God nor with His Christ. Still He says: " What 
I do thou knowest not now, but thou shalt know hereafter." 

For preparation is always more than prediction. The 
training of the Twelve was a facsimile, in the small, of the 
training of the Church, still uncompleted. 

What silly questions they asked, what absurd requests 
they made, and with what wisdom they were postponed. 
The process is so natural that we do not realize what a dis- 
tance they had traveled between the fifth chapter of Mat- 
thew and the fifteenth chapter of the Acts. How the spirit- 
ual landscape has widened before them! Their minds are 
clearing, they become positive, convincing, their words seize 
men for God. 

The fifth book of the New Testament is a key and a bond. 
What was reserved because before premature is now an open 
secret. The epistles became both grand explanations and 
tremendous prophecies. They reach back of Genesis and 
beyond the Apocalypse. We see the fishermen become giants 
and the purblind Pharisee of Tarsus opens his eyes upon the 
vistas of eternity. The " progress of doctrine " in the New 
6% 



Testament is a symbol of its progress in the comprehensions 
of men. Slowly men learn Christ, blinking as those unclos- 
eted at noon. Fallow ages wait upon mortal dullness, so 
patient is our God. 

The seed grows, but it grows secretly, and culminations 
are delayed until the world can bear them. God is always 
ahead of the times. The men who strive to be abreast of 
the colors are they who lead their generations. Who of you 
will march there? 

The evangelists were not stenographers. They gave but 
a sketch of our Lord's deeds and words. They did not min- 
ister even to a reverent curiosity. The Gospel will have 
news for us in the life to come. Eighteen years of Christ's 
life is condensed into three or four sentences. 

And not even yet have we wrought His precepts to a tithe 
of their logical conclusions. Still unguessed corollaries of 
thought and duty lie in this treasure which our shafts have 
so scantily mined. Which of us can imagine that he has 
sighted the circumference of the Lord's prayer ? Thank 
God if we have learned its centre ! 

It is the attainment of each period that makes possible its 
successor. None is independent, none is final, and God 
alone is infallible. He who has guided, still guides. His 
truth is perennial and becomes concrete in each generation. 
The idolatry of any one cycle, equally with the neglect of 
any, is disloyalty to the presidency of the Holy Ghost. As 
long as man listens, God speaks. He has yet many things 
to say, in English, that we could not bear now. Therefore, 
our transcript of God's meaning, the statement of our 
apprehensions of it, must ever widen. We must take obser- 
vation each noon. One Sun, but many seas, many shores. 
Providence is a biological science. Moral history is a grow- 
ing volume. All is concentric, nay, Christocentric; but about 
that centre each lengthening century describes an ampler 
circle. Every life works with the equation of the spiral. 
God's consummations are as gradual as they are resistless. 

53 



Reserves and remainders await our strength. Timely reti- 
cence subtends amazing yet all- consistent movement among 
Earth's peoples. We can no more set the clock of Christen- 
dom forward than we can turn it back. The new authority 
that was to supplant Greece, new ideals, new sciences, new 
arts — all these ( and that not by destruction but by ful- 
filment ) were capsulate in the Gospel. Again and again 
man has sung, and truly, 

" We were the first that ever burst 
Into that silent sea." 

but the silent sea becomes a thorofare, the wilderness a gar- 
den, the lone hill an observatory. 

We would be nonplussed and stunned were the vision 
opened to us too soon of what the world and man will be 
like when the unfathomable petition is answered: "Thy 
will be done on Earth, as it is in Heaven." 

The latest edition is never the last. Each new evolution 
of manifolded wisdom is " revised and enlarged." Veil after 
veil is rent in twain, and still there are unexplored remainders 
whose reservation is alluring. The Sun of righteousness is 
not burnt out, and the harvests of today are the seed of 
tomorrow. We have yet more to learn. As beginners, we 
are prone to overrate our powers. We say, as Peter once 
said it, " Why cannot we follow Thee now ? " We forget 
the commentary of experience. We would force the mystery 
and discount God ! 

In our grasp of Christ's meaning for ourselves and for 
mankind there must be a constant revision and recombina- 
tion, along with a hearty appreciation of all new light. The 
terms of physical science discredit today what once were its 
undisputed formulas. In two generations it will, no doubt, 
retire some of its present theories as now it abandons 
"epicycles" and "phlogiston." 

But the bigger knowledge can never make the idea of God 
smaller. The Word will still fill the world. With whatever 
54 



light is reflected in the mirror there will evermore shine there 
one face! The potencies of splendid and unimagined days are 
in that " Arch-chemic Sun." " We have seen but a part of 
His ways." The evangel that makes creature at one with 
his Creator is a spectroscope, revealing the elemental unity of 
all moral worlds, and for this world it will be found not only 
to meet, but also be found to have made each new time. Its 
applications to life exceed all that we have imagined. " Suf- 
fer it to be so now " silences many of our shallow objections. 
" The half is not told us." The interstitial stars in Christ's 
sight gleam already. What could Galileo have done with 
the Yerkes glass? But what will that be when the sugges- 
tion of the eye of the fly is fully wrought out and compound 
lenses gather at one point a cone of rays whose base diame- 
ter is forty feet, not four? 

We are still in the rudiments and see with kitten-sight! 
And if our grasp of matter is still so primitive, need we 
wonder that in the realm of purpose God still garments 
Himself with unapproachable light? He tempers His won- 
ders while He trains man up toward them, and amid all 
Apocalypse " seals up the things which seven thunders 
utter." In this open Bible there is that written of which 

" Not Gabriel asks the reason why, 
Nor God the reason gives." 

Much is withheld against that day whereof the Master of 
all hearts declared, " Ye shall ask Me no question." He 
knows that the suspension of much of our curiosity in no 
wise interferes with present obedience, and checks many an 
impertinence of over-importunity with that recorded irony, 
" Your time is always ready! " 

When " difficulties vainly curious and doubts impossible 
to be solved " excite us, we may well recite that touching 
prayer of burly Sam Johnson, " against inquisitive and per- 
plexing thoughts." It is a wise prayer for the wisest man, 
and to the wisest, easiest. In every loving ear there sounds 

55 



a constant whisper : " I have yet many things to say unto 
you." If this great idea of gracious postponement has at 
all fastened your attention, you have seen how it clarifies 
both Scripture and life, and how it answers both fear and 
hope. It affirms the continuity of Christ. It vitalizes all 
present attainments. It shows how each broader and deeper 
day " hath new needs and new helps for these." 

It articulates all tenses and binds together the physical 
unity of all worlds as a scene for the dramatic unity of all 
events. It makes time only a mode of thought, and life 
omnipresent. Crisis may introduce crisis, but omniscience 
includes all issues. Queries to be solved, doubts to be re- 
solved, duties to be done, trials to be borne — the Word 
is nigh. We have read the Pilgrim's Progress as boys; we 
shall understand it as men. The skies will deepen. 

" What first we guessed as points, I now know stars." 
You will arrive where you could no more return to your old 
measures than the New York Central Railway could put its 
business back upon a single track system! 

You may blanch when Christ puts into your hand that 
cup whereof you now think to say, " We are able to drink 
it"; but you will not blench if you have learned that He 
never asks of you more than you can bear. We have been 
enabled to meet many things that seemed impossible; we 
shall be again. Power shall rest upon us and He shall "de- 
liver our souls in peace from the battle that is against us." 

" My God, I would not long to see 
My fate with curious eyes." 

We want no palmistry save that of His wounded hand. 
It is not the time table, but the engineer, that brings the 
train thro. Devotion does not demand demonstration. 
One can be a filial son yet not have read his father's will. 

I have thus far elaborated an idea that, rightly held, com- 
mands both modesty and hope, and in^them each, deter- 
mined courage. Diffidence toward our own knowledge as 
56 



final and confidence in God's wisdom as infallible, is that 
which sets forward the world and our own souls. This spirit 
of outlook surpasses every yesterday and lives under a per- 
petual dawn. The unhasting, unresting, evolution of God's 
plan is " the master light of all our seeing." It is more 
penetrative than any cathode ray. It saves us from indif- 
ference and from irresolution. It applies old truth to the 
new time, and with perennial revelation declares the world 
to be a divine laboratory. The book written and history 
yet writing, — the busy Spirit is alive in both. Withheld 
completions, reserved revelations, suspended harmonies — 
these make life more than logic, and prove Christ the 
dateless Son of God. We are all the pupils of an inex- 
haustible Teacher, finding 

" * * progress, man's distinctive mark alone, 
Not God's, and not the beasts'; God is, they are, 
Man partly is and partly hopes to be." 

The times and seasons of human affairs find here their in- 
terpretation and forecast. Races and empires and authori- 
ties and constitutions and suffrages write large the text 
with which we have dealt. The Church, the State, custom 
and statute, all that the society of man means and can 
mean, are to demonstrate that Christ has " yet many things 
to say." The signs of the times are a holy horoscope. 
Awakened Japan; crude China; semi-barbaric Russia; hectic 
France; imperious Germany; the two Englands — one the 
England of Wyckliffe and Milton and Browning, the other 
the England of miserly diplomacy whose robes are now 
splotched with the wet blood of Armenia; two Americas — 
the one leal to her high opportunity, the other mad for 
money and thinking to tamper with the very standards of 
honesty — all this collision of local advantage and of univer- 
sal truth; Christ sits serene above the floods, and by all 
changes and crises, collisions, catastrophes, utters His decree 
and brings in His kingdom. Fight under that flag, ye who 
are men ! New courage shall discover a new world. 

57 



This law of graded advance may well guide us in our con- 
sideration of that which we await for the College of our love. 
The constant uses and survives the transient. Whatever 
has been good and is better, implies, begins, and assures the 
best that is to be. Forms pass, but life indefeasible and 
crescent, weaves its changing robe, transcending and surviv- 
ing earlier measures. 1793 was our day of small things, as 
all seminal days are outwardly small. They called the rude 
frame building, for * six years uncompleted, " Kirkland's 
folly " ; but our seer Samuel was a true futurist and builded 
more than he foresaw or could foretell. His bones lie yon- 
der in goodly and growing company, but the school is the 
spiritual body wherein " he being dead, yet speaketh." The 
little house there is a parable. That patriotic, reverent and 
confident beginning lived. Because it lived it increased. It 
shall live, and live there, drawing ever upon the elastic and 
unwasting forces which speak alike in science and in psalm. 
There reason and reverence shall go hand in hand. There, 
long after our forms are dust, shall the kindly mother sit in 
her bowered door and in her plain, unwavering loveliness 
smile upon her children, rocking her dear, old-fashioned 
cradle and holding tender converse with her returning family. 
With beautiful, undimming eyes she shall survey the calm 
valley, with its scenes that change with every upward step, 
and that are never two days the same; she shall muse upon 
the grey and violet hills, upon all the fugitive beauties of 
the world and the shimmering skies beyond them, until 
Earth's last sunset shall enfold her, and eternity's first 
morning, with all its tremulous mystery of light, shall kiss 
her tranquil and triumphant brow. Thro an adolescence not 
without the ills of infancy, the Academy grew up to the es- 
tate of the College, merging its name in that 01 its earlier 
lover. But the hard-won charter of 1812 was a permission 
rather than a pledge, a fond hope rather than an assurance. 
The graduates of 1814 could now barely enter Sophomore, 
and that under conditions. 

58 



Along a devious channel, with many rifts and eddies and 
shifting snags, the current has flowed, but wider, deeper, 
past these years four-score and four. Many benevolent 
tributaries and many unseen springs of prayer and sacrifice 
have fed its increase, until now by its banks are stately trees, 
whose roots its waters have sustained and whose interlaced 
shadows waver upon its placid breadth. 

Hamilton is not a gourd of yesterday, but a goodly vine 
with fruitful boughs, and long tomorrows are to come. Sons 
and grandsons and godsons are hers, and she is theirs to love 
and to cherish. I speak to a throng of them today, and I 
set home to them all the word of the providential and per- 
petual Christ, " I have yet many things to say unto you ! " 
I speak out boldly, as I ought to, to new friends and old, 
and urge them to look upon this stubborn and stalwart work 
of ours and to ask themselves where they can more wisely 
bestow their substance, or in better hope of its persistent 
benefit to the generations to be ? Who will come to the 
kingdom for such a time as this and join their names in im- 
mortal usefulness with those of Hamilton and Kirkland ? 

Men of the Class of '96 : 

Up, all of you ! Not for today only, but for tomorrow 
and the days after. " Is not the Lord gone out before you ?" 
Hear Christ ! Hear all He yet will say to you. The word 
is nigh you. Obtuse to temptation and obstinately dutiful, 
stand away from those who prefer to get thro life by the 
dishonor system! Renounce, denounce, the worships of 
Gain. Stand out from among the breed of idlers and snobs. 
Accept the ordination of duty. 

This impetuous and momentous time calls for resolute 
and muscled character, brains unillusioned by partial ideas, 
souls so sympathetic with globed and celestial truth as to be 
superior to segmental and terrestial half-truths. Remember 
every pathway and door, every leafy aisle of quiet and 
each dreaming vista of that good place up yonder, and carry 

59 



a country heart into the whirl of crowds and the tumult of 
cities. Be critics always and cynics never. Whatever may 
go wrong, do you go right, and so the mildew of pessimism, 
the canker of envy, and the dry-rot of selfishness shall not 
come near your souls. Have such an idealism as thrilled in 
those lines of Holmes that preserved the good ship Constitu- 
tion — a sense of the past, of " our father's God," and of 
His continuity, and His hand shall pilot you safe home to 
port. Be learners to the last, for 

" Since all things suffer change save God the Truth, 
Man apprehends Him newly at each stage. 

Whereat Earth's ladder drops, its service done, 
And nothing shall prove twice what once was proved." 

It is this that shall round the age of science into the age 
of song. 

Fare you all well ! My own good-by to you is one with 
no unpleasant recollections and with many bright ones. I 
have seen you grow. Grow on, and in the day of the goal 
and the garland, when the pearly citadels of Heaven peal out 
their welcome to all faithful disciples, may each of us be 
there to hear, amid all lesser salutations, this: " I have yet 
many things to say unto you ! " 



60 



THE ABUNDANT LIFE 

TO THE GRADUATING CLASS, JUNE 20, 1897 
/ came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly. John 10 :10 

It is the privilege which my office confers to give to each 
class, upon the threshold of its exit from this College, a last 
word of instruction, and to make to them a final appeal in 
the name of God. For the fifth time I attempt this duty. 
It is altogether fitting that a college course which seeks to 
bind and crown all its methods with the science of obliga- 
tion, and which has ever recognized the hallowing motives 
of a supreme allegiance, which has continually blended de- 
votion with inculcation, which does not admit the arbitrary 
division between the secular and the sacred, which teaches 
that all the utilities of knowledge find their full significance 
only in the rational and reverent acceptance of " man's chief 
end," — that such a college course should culminate in a de- 
vout meditation and in psalms of dedication and hope. 

The Shepherd of all men declares in this our text that His 
mission is to confer the abundant life. And I make it my 
present errand to point you toward such a life and to its 
standards and guarantees. Life is the thing — boundless as 
its Lord and Giver — satisfying, infrustrable, immortal. 

There are never lacking cynical and satirical lips to sneer 
at the enthusiasm and eager confidence of graduating men; 
but the pathetic courage and the ardent assurance of youth 
is given continually to replace the nullity and numbness of 
those whose own inferior accomplishment seduces them to 
question the cause and abandon the fight. Mine be the 
task rather to challenge the utmost resolution of youth, and 
to summon its energy, undaunted by other failures and de- 
sertions, to tie sword to wrist, enlisted for all the battle and 
for the whole war. Self and failure menace you, but " the 
law of the spirit of Life in Jesus Christ " shall make you 
free and conquering. 

61 



Modern laboratories have rendered us familiar with the 
word Biology. It includes so much, that in the interests of 
exactness its teachers are already insisting upon replacing 
the term by its subdivisions. It has been used as a title for 
the science of all the forms of all life; but that is Morphol- 
ogy. Histology, Anatomy, Physiology are included under it. 

Biology is, accurately, the Science of Life. Thus it is the 
widest possible term for all vital fact, and it includes even 
Theology. For God is Life. Gathering its subject-matter 
all the way from Botany to Ethics, Biology comprehends far 
more than the realm of appearance. It must take in Sociol- 
ogy, as that takes in the relations not of men only, but of all 
intelligent beings. Surely, if technical, this is not obscure, 
and it affirms that life comprises all the relations of ani- 
mate creatures, and their joint relation to the Creator. 
Here at last is the ultimate unity. 

Relation is not optional, but inevitable. It is not acci- 
dental, it is articulated — an organism. Its implications are 
commands. Therefore no arbitrarily partial relation, nor 
any partiality toward a few of its features, can touch the 
ends of being. Christ came to teach Biology — in its broad- 
est sense, that ! He made it in His own person an induc- 
tive science! He revealed its innermost secret and its out- 
most abundance. 

He renounced the anti-social spirit of self, and giving His 
life a ransom of others, nailed to His cross the ordinances of 
caste and clan. I do not shrink from saying that those two 
cardinal maxims of Louis Blanc are just: " From each ac- 
cording to his capacity, to each according to his need," and, 
" The more a man can, the more he ought." I say that 
these are just; for closely they paraphrase the word of the 
Son of Man: " He that is chief among you, let him be the 
servant of all." All the walls of artificial demarcation and 
social cruelty preach that with a strident voice. Flatly the 
original Gospel joins issue with that fictitious and fastidious 
self-importance which praises ability at the expense of ser- 



viceability, and suffers patronizing to supplant sympathy. 
The word Socialism need not scare us. Some kind we must 
have, God's kind, or Satan's. 

To gush and sentimentalize and dabble with human prob- 
lems as a pretty fad and incidental diversion can never help 
the struggling world. The squadrons of power that shall 
ride gloriously to " let in the law " are not mounted upon 
hobby-horses. The " sons and daughters that prophesy " 
are not such as revel in merely theatrical statistics and sigh 
over sorrows they never touched with a little ringer: but are 
such as are in earnest to get something done, even if they 
have to do it themselves. 

The school girl at Niagara exclaimed, " Isn't it cunning!" 
Yes, it is cunning — don't fall in ! 

Bishop Westcott somewhere writes : " Little thoughts do 
not fit little duties. In the fulfillment of simple routine we 
need, more than anywhere else, the quickening influence of 
the highest motive." 

The largest possible life must have the truest possible cen- 
tre, and must live from that in its detail. A large life is ex- 
pensive. It costs life — that, and no less. He who speaks 
to us knew that, and paid the price. 

"All the words of life " are in Him, and His ideas go to 
the bottom of every social and personal question, with its 
exactions and its rewards. The Christianity of Christ, 
urging that life is more than its raiment, not resting upon a 
consensus of scholars but upon the obedience of disciples, 
cares nothing for conventional adulterations, and demands 
that the interior thought shall be incarnated in the exterior 
conduct. He showed a principle that worked, Who offers us 
His own life only upon His own terms. One cannot spring 
an arch from a single pier, and Christ cares naught for the 
accurate theory that does not bend over to the solid expres- 
sion of deed. 

The abundant life has many outlets, but one source, as its 
chemic, caloric, actinic rays proceed from the one Sun. 

63 



Each whole life is a revised version of the Gospel. Great 
expression waits upon great purpose. The Father does not 
cast us off because we let go the best He could help us to: 
but he helps us to the next best, even down to the smallest. 
What is to hinder any one of you from being truly great ? 
Nothing but your own refusal ! 

The Master of history being in evidence, life is abundant 
in its declining to put up with any second-rate. Saving may 
be a virtue or a vice. 

Refusal to waste upon what is unworthy implies ability to 
give all for the pearl of price. Spend life we must, as we go; 
the crucial question is — What for ? It is like the manna. 
We may leave it — wasted. Use it — to live more. Keep 
it — to rot. Today's usufruct of power withers if we at- 
tempt to hold it for tomorrow. We may squander, or use, 
today: we cannot save it over. 

You have a personal capital, to turn over with interest or to 
hide in a hole. What a man spends he has, what he keeps 
spends him. Life, like money, is not a value except as it is 
a medium of exchange. It is a measure of value. As he 
hits the happy mean between a money-lover and a money- 
waster who knows what a dollar is worth and what it is not 
worth, so your supreme question is: "What shall I spend 
life for, to make it get the most ? " 

Save yourself for yourself, you lose yourself! Spend your- 
self with Christ and you gain His life, and with it yours. 
This is the vital paradox. " Except a corn of wheat fall 
into the ground and die it abide th alone." Natural law 
answers spiritual. Life is reproduced by transmutation. It 
is not a form, it is a self-conscious motion thro form. The 
abundant life is that which most submits to the law of giv- 
ing. We only have what we bestow. Selfishness then is 
suicide. He lives largest who confers most. Living is loving, 
and " love seeketh not her own/' He who saves others, him- 
self does not save. Only that which a man does not save 
saves him. He revealed that, Who " by death destroyed the 



poWer of death ! An eye rolled inward loses the light and 
sees nothing. Self because so small a goal is futile and fatal. 
It is " by its means defeated of its ends." Atrophy ! " A 
man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things 
which he possesseth." It is not how much, but whereunto ! 

Receive a great and heavenly vision of the law of nobility 
as the Supreme Man showed it, and you will see that the 
abundant life has a motive that will hold taut as a cable in a 
storm, and that sounds like a harp. This high thrift does not 
heed the code of usage which asks what it must not do and 
what it must give up — that is picayune and sordid : but rather 
it turns from negative virtues to positive, ejects the lower 
conception, and from the tyranny of verboten turns to the free- 
dom of great permissions — " against which there is no law." 

This is the assertion of the true, the only, the boundless 
manhood. The young man who " went away " was he who 
refused this abundance. He dared not take the best. 

But there was one who dared, who at the parting of the 
ways said, " Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do ? " and 
then did what was showed him to the last ! It was he who 
learned to write, " all things are yours." He accepted the 
whole life. Not lazy, apologetic, tentative, procrastinating, 
he lived constructively and found " all the fulness of God." 
He found a life worth living. No carpet-knight this Paul ! 
Within prison walls he could testify, " I have all, and 
abound ! " This " little gleam of time between two eterni- 
ties " furnished him a commanding outlook. " Things 
present and things to come " stood in complete relation to 
his total allegiance. 

His transcendant faith knew none of the whimperings and 
sarcasms which reveal the abject disappointment of low 
motives. 

Circe has potions for all who will take them — swine- 
herdess that she is ! Stop your ears and sail by ! 

All that is noblest is within reach of him who wills it. 

" Man is one world, and hath another to attend him " — 

65 



Angels minister to one whose masterful determination 
refuses the beguilement of secondary things. 

He lives most, not who lives longest, but who lives deepest, 
broadest, hardest — who increases his resultant sum by 
shortening each process. Time is a different thing to each 
man; for to each it is measured by what he makes it con- 
tain. Ten years of one man's time may equal thirty of 
another's. Stephen lived more than Methuselah ! 

To open your being to the big thoughts, to the wide sym- 
pathies, to the determinative, aggressive and dominant 
activities — that is to " abound exceedingly." Who meas- 
ures the life of Lincoln by its mere years ? 

Live your own lives; borrow no leave to be; dare the 
heights of duty. It is a tremulous and tremendous time in 
which your days are cast. It needs leaders and will scorn 
laggards. Church and State, the whole complex of society 
cries out, "Whom shall we send, and who will go for us ? 
Only the most obdurate goodness can handle the tools of 
manhood. Humanity comes to its noon. It is nothing to 
meet the mob of opinions with blank cartridges when the 
very standards of personal truth are roughly assaulted. We 
inherit and we must match the inkstand of Luther, the tele- 
scope of Galileo, Latimer's candle, Beza's anvil, the axe of 
John the Baptist, the pen of Lincoln. You are summoned 
to be so much what you may be, that a good politician can 
no longer be described as " a man that will stay bought," 
that law shall become less " the science of evading justice," 
that religion shall seem less " a straddling of two worlds ! " 
A business man and dear friend of mine wrote me a few days 
since: " Ability is plenty and smartness overabundant : but 
blank, square honesty is, oh, how scarce." Honest with 
yourselves, your fellow men, your God, may you make it 
less scarce. 

Men of the Class of '97 : 

Toil the toils of men until your days are done ! Give 
66 



your very best and every best to the tasks to which you go. 
Run with the pacemakers and help to break the records. 

Never forget the dreams and aspirations of the youthful 
days when you were college boys becoming God's men. 
Never forget that old campus, veiled in the meshes of May 
moonlight or scarfed in the soft draperies of the Indian sum- 
mer. Cry still the cry of the winter sled way — " Road ! 
Road ! " Men will ever give the path to momentum. 
Crowds gather at the exhibitions of that wonderful modern 
invention, the biograph, because all sense of motion is exhil- 
arating. Be real, and beyond all simulation you shall attract 
men by a better impulse than curiosity. In life as in par- 
liamentary law, to do anything some one must make a 
motion. If you are to carry anything in this world's quorum 
you must get the floor. As time slips in small change from 
your purses, cherish with gratitude the memory of these 
crystal days, and when your war is fully on recall each item 
of tactics and equipment here taught and taken. Your 
record is one of honor, of faithful, scholarly toil, of order and 
loyalty. We who stay on will drink your health at the old 
well, and name with pride a class whose life was not meas- 
ured by quantity but by quality. I saw you enter, I shout 
you Godspeed as you depart. You came to us when much 
was but an eager hope that now merges toward assurance. 
From all your future stations send us back your greetings — 
nay, bring them, often. Faces will change — your comrades 
and more slowly your instructors — but surely all of them 
will pass. Hamilton will always be your own — " to have 
and to hold, to love and to cherish." Wear with honor those 
historic colors which Kirkland wore at Fort Stanwix while 
over Oneida's virgin fortress waved the first stars and stripes. 
By and by, oh that it might be mine once more to call your 
roll and no man absent, having passed between the piers of 
the rainbow and obtaining all of us " an abundant entrance 
into the eternal kingdom." Good-by ! Nay, — Au revoir I 

67 



OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM 

TO THE GRADUATING CLASS, JUNE 26, 1898 

We know that to them that love God all things work together for good. 

Romans 8 :28. 

Again the summer and the final days of the college life of 
a class. Once more the greetings and the good-bys. Swift 
hours — romantic and pathetic, sweet and sad. A happy 
dream, " which is not all a dream," is for you to whom this 
occasion chiefly belongs, well-nigh spent. 

" Something beautiful is vanished, 
And we sigh for it in vain ; 
We behold it everywhere, 
On the earth and in the air, 
But it it never comes again." 

Now we clear a little space where yesterday salutes to- 
morrow. After our good old custom we make one more 
Sunday hour, and in it may your hearts preach to you in 
better than my words. My part is but a prompter's part. 
Listen to your own searching thoughts and grasp that warm, 
invisible hand which is not far from every one of you. 

Simple and vast, our text, with its dozen monosyllables, 
twists together innumerable strands of suggestions and 
tethers us to all that is brave and enduring. It has many 
implications. Fixed in the web of its great chapter it traces 
the inseparability of God's children from God's love, and 
introduces that climax in which, challenging peril and pain, 
time and eternity, death and demons, faith soars from the 
depths of weakness to the bosom of God. It leaps into the 
invincible sureties of that covenant whose chain of salvation 
binds loyalty with eternity. Purpose and power have forged 
it, and there is no link missing. Plan, pledge, providence, 
make inviolable sequence from the dateless foreknowledge to 
68 



the utmost glory. " If God be for us, who can be against us!" 
Or, verbally, and apart from the woven argument, here is 
the dignity and universality of the law of labor. In a sys- 
tem where " all things work," the idler, whatsoever else 
he be, is the moral pauper ! 

Or, higher yet, it declares the harmonious energy, the 
common consent, of all that is and moves under the juris- 
diction of the Maker. Force answers mind. Wise ends wait 
upon all evolution. Change knows no chance. In the whirl 
of the Earth upon its soft spindles, all object is obedient. 
In " the ordered music of the marching orbs " there is no 
schism. The beauty and the blessing of conformity to 
supreme law is written upon atom and star. Only in a 
seceded will is there dissonance and pain. But, not tarrying, 
tho touching these wealths of duty and power, the text 
widens its wings for a realm where parable and enigma are 
translated into open vision. It is not a theorem but an 
axiom. It turns the light of intuition upon all else. Query 
and vicissitude melt into recognition. We know ! 

I single this aphorism, this total truth, and holding it up 
in its purity and fullness, luminous and lovely, I bid you see 
how far and revealingly it shines. This it declares — that 
all blessing lies in that relation to God which we call love. 
Intuition does not measure itself by the three steps of logic. 
It flies. It is super-rational. The conviction that God is 
trustworthy, that life, as Hugo says, " is not a cul-de-sac, 
but an avenue," that the soul is not a conundrum, but an 
answer, that law is not fickle nor expectancy vain, this sur- 
rounds and sustains the sciences which compass things with 
that nearer phenomenon of the heart which we call religion. 
The only working theory either of physics or of prayer is 
that which postulates a love which cannot lie. The moral 
fidelity of God fits all these curious and intricate locks of 
object and event, and cannot be accidental. Fitness is par- 
cel to purpose. Type tossed into the air do not fall into 
a book — not into a primer, far less into an organum. The 

09 



facts that so " work together " reveal an omniscient and all- 
controlling Mind. Consequence is consent. Only perversity 
refuses the certainty that an intelligent heart rules the 
world. This clue alone fits all these multiplex wards. The 
rule that solves ten thousand problems proves and counter- 
proves its trustworthiness by the answers. The integrity of 
God is a solvent, where all else blunders and fails. It is 
centripetal thro all abysses and meets wonder with a wisdom 
" forever telling, yet untold ! " 

It is our birthright to read moral issues into all that now 
seems precarious and postponing. We are made to expect 
a crisis and culmination — a " far-off, divine event " toward 
which, with its distribution and its retribution, " the whole 
creation moves." The groaning and travailing prophesies a 
"song of deliverance," else were goodness a myth and rea- 
son forsworn. This is the base-line of moral certainty by 
which we measure, past the furrows of darkness, to the 
coasts and crests of light. This is the seership that war- 
rants the apostle. If God loves and lives, if man loves, it 
must be ! Between these two pencils, brought point to 
point, leaps the convincing light. It is the shechinah. In 
the glowing consent of fact to purpose He is announced 
whose " life is the light of men." Each ray shows a path of 
the shortest distance, and the first beam of His dawn in the 
soul is a herald of the million-arrowed noon. That little 
child whom Christ ever sets in the midst of our arguments 
has learned nothing of the physics or the chemistry of light : 
but, with no theory of the eye, sees, and knows that he sees. 
Why should we quibble over the perceptions of our souls, or 
tamper with the great verity they corroborate ? Let the 
rapturous overtones flood the inmost soul — their music is 
their truth ! 

Impiety may scout subjective evidence and resent the love 
it resists : but let us rather refuse the insanity of faithless- 
ness, which leaps the orbit where loving obedience answers 
loving law, and let us bow down, — 
70 



" Like lily flower, that to and fro 
Is tossed upon the waters wide, 
Uncaring for the changeful tide ; 
Its root is firm below." 

That Living One Who from the black ooze evokes the lily, 
will gauge the frail stem of circumstance that, unhurt, all 
white and fragrant hearts may float just atop. 

So fuelled with human experience, but lit with sacred fire, 
our text blazes in the apostle's hand like a beacon cresset. 
His splendid soul is in its flame ! 

" To them that love God all things work together for 
good." No heart-deep cry for deliverance from evil will be 
unanswered. In His own time, but surely at the last, God 
will " do good to them that be good." 

This pledge of ultimate succor sets out the conditions and 
the methods of the supreme blessing. Question of all ques- 
tions — Do you love God ? Not, do you admire, respect, 
study: but, do you love ? Opinion and action are not final. 
Unless you love Him He could not bless you. The very law 
of love excludes the unloving ! Not to love is the " law of 
sin and death." You baffle yourself, and all sweet bells are 
"jangled, out of tune and harsh." Harmony is the base of 
music, and music, too, is at last love's parable. The infinite 
Yes stands over against the " everlasting No." 

Now, for comparison, put in turn, by our text, two other 
views of the meaning of human life — philosophies which, 
while polar opposites, exclude, each of them, the spirit's true 
relation to God. Contradictions they are of each other, but 
contradiction each is, of free choice and of accountability, 
with all the gravity and grandeur of these. 

Optimism — Pessimism. These tri-syllables, now so much 
popularized and even devitalized, are school- terms for 
theories which in literature are as old as the book of Job, 
and which in life are answered by a thousand adages. 

Optimism declares that all is for the best. Taken right- 
eously, it is a majestic truth. But crude optimism alleges 

71 



that " all is for the best " for everyone, and irrespective of 
the individual right or wrong ! — that all currents set to the 
Hespe rides. In the realms of a holy God this raw opiate is 
a most stupendous and stupid vagary. Betterment there 
can not be unless good is the standard: but goodness and 
goods are not to be confused. Things, apart from the direc- 
tion of a heart-discriminating God, are but a basket of ser- 
pents twisting and sliddering upon themselves ! 

Plain men use few elaborate or analytical terms: but all 
men think much alike, and in colloquial speach optimism 
says, " Everything will come out all right." It is a specious 
laissez-faire notion. Right will be the victor: but only the 
righteous will share its victory. Having well dined, it is 
easy to wash one's hands " in imperceptible water," and to 
set forth this bland self -leniency : but it is as cruel to 
human misery as it is untrue to God's words, and the 
wounds of life requite it as an irony with quick, bleeding 
protests. That men may drift up the torrent ! — that the 
sharp thorns of disobedience shall somehow bear the vintage 
of the King ! — that, all of themselves, these cursed condi- 
tions shall become paradise ! — that the abnormal is to glide 
into order, and that sowing to the flesh is to reap the fruits 
of the Spirit ! It proposes alchemy, and is a credulity with- 
out instance or guarantee. No ! " The very good figs and 
the very bad figs " are separated. Like yields like. What- 
soever a man soweth, that shall he also reap ! " 

Apart from the intervention of God in Christ, human 
affairs are as dry of consolation as the breasts of the Sphinx. 
The plaint is everywhere : " I am pained so that I can not 
hear. I am dismayed so that I can not see. My heart 
panteth. Horror hath affrighted me. The twilight that I 
desired hath been turned into trembling." 

If from things only, without moral force or fulcrum, we 
have hope, we are of all men most miserable ! No misan- 
thropy could devise worse than to feed the heart with such 
ashes. " A lie in its right hand," the sleek complacency of 
72 



optimism ill suits this woful world, with its delusion that 
the crackling wreck will mend itself ! Between font and 
funeral there comes too much that tasks and tortures the 
soul of man for him to fall in with this irony. Love, as it 
cries over the cradle or the coffin, asks something more than 
an epicurean formula. Hunger can not eat a bill of fare. 
The soul wants better than laudanum. Prayer (and all 
men sometimes pray,) petitions an intervention which this 
clumsy optimism disdains. Progress in knowledge alone is 
but more light upon the interior of a crypt. An errant race 
has no " upward trend " save when the superhuman Gospel 
heals its ways. The progress of man, all by himself, is 
quicksand progress — each struggle a worse entanglement. 
Nothing gravitates up ! Detachment from God is at cross- 
purposes with all things. It is under centrifugal law. This 
spurious and hypnotizing theory, ignoring the nature of sin, 
bites off the immutable conditions of redemption and offers 
no evidence for its astounding carte blanche. Misery knows 
that if mere force is installed in place of divine love and in- 
tervention, there is left only a universe of grinding cog- 
wheels and groaning victims : for sin has fallen afoul of law, 
and broken law crushes. Put a merely philosophical optim- 
ism upon the rack of fact, and she must recant her perjury 
with gnashing teeth ! O soul — wait thou upon only God; 
for thine expectation is from Him ! 

Give the floor to pessimism. It holds this world to be 
superlatively evil, the worst world possible, without hope 
and without God. Put to its ultimatum, it proclaims life to 
be the supreme disaster and the dream of betterment or of 
salvation to be its chief curse. Professing to perceive man 
an orphan by birth, it reviles blessedness as an ideal that 
can only intensify despair. Malevolence is supreme, but 
impersonal, and therefore inaccessible even to blasphemy. 
Its present is but an artistic hell, horizoned with cast iron, 
beauty but the grimace of an elaborate scheme of torture, 
music a refined cruelty, love hypocrisy, and all its men and 

73 



women either fiends or fools. "Who will show us any 
good ! " This terrific interpretation is not always carried to 
its conclusions; but it is not scarce. Shakespere translated 
it thro Hamlet: 

" How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable 
Seem to me all the uses of this world." 

And thro Macbeth : 

" Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player 
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, 
And then is heard no more. It is a tale 
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, 
Signifying nothing." 

But mark that these are the cries on the one hand of a 
querulous reason, on the other of a murderous will. 

Tragedy is truer to appearance than comedy, and to say 
No hope, is more intelligible than to say, No fear ! But 
while pessimism tears away the tissue garlands of optimism, 
it too is both superficial and arbitrary. It extinguishes "the 
candle of the Lord " and then glares into the surrounding 
dark. Its angry and acrid pride denies Love's answer, and 
then, self- thwarted, it snarls that all things work together 
for evil ! It is the morbid and unmanly covert of an un- 
submissive will, and tantalized by its own froward choice 
its melancholy is its accusation. The curious affinity of 
these two opposite theories appears in the readiness with 
which epicureanism embraces cynicism, and credulity reacts 
into abject hate. Incorrigible self-seeking — "by its means 
defeated of its ends " — turns finally to sneering suicide ! If 
there is no loving and lifting God, then Swift and Byron and 
Schopenhauer and Haeckel are sufficient, and then the pa- 
ganism of the later Locksley Hall may well usher in the era 
of lawlessness with pandemoniac yells, while all the civiliza- 
tion the affirmation of Christ has wrought expires in con- 
vulsions whose dust darkens the Sun with sackcloth ! An 
optimism that forgets God leads into the hand of pessimism, 

74 



and both reject the planetary orbit for the cometary — 
" wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of 
darkness forever." 

But for us who believe in a holy God, neither the pan- 
theistic sadness of Buddha nor the unethical audacity of 
Mohammed. Our text for a lamp, we may be aware of the 
anarchy of self, poppied or thorn-set, base and brutal in 
either issue. Love is the third alternative. Its denial is the 
strong delusion. Our spirits, made to find mere sense so 
disappointing, are the pledge of some better things. 

The very shadows of evil witness to the brilliant light. 
The splendid grief is counterproof that husks and swine are 
not our proper portion. A world where a cross utters love 
is not forsaken. The Devil is not God. 

Letting circumstance exclude attribute, one of these ca- 
prices dreams of Utopia and thinks Heaven could be no 
better; the other stares at pain and thinks Hell could be no 
worse. But both are partial and fallacious, busy with goods 
and ignoring good, or busy with evils and forgetting evil. 
Whether generalizing from a full stomach or from a fierce 
will, each finds its bane in the idolatry of the present tense. 
But, neither blinding its eyes nor tearing off its^eyelids, the 
Christian theory of this world spans both the depths and the 
heights. It sees that both fortune and misfortune are but 
half-truths. To that bar where conscious responsibility 
knows that " it can, because it ought, 5 ' it summons the as- 
sumptions of fatalism and the contributory negligence of 
indifferentism. It meets misery with the dilemma of mercy, 
and upon the canvas which philosophy has but primed it 
sets the at once darker and more dazzling revelations of guilt 
and of grace. Death bluntly interrupts these merely mun- 
dane reasonings, whether fanciful or frantic; but in this 
abrupt world, " over whose acres walked those blessed feet," 
there is at large a more excellent answer. A song is tuned in 
the night, and our text, at once pledge and plea, flows into that 
matchless apostrophe, — " neither death nor life, nor things 

75 



present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, shall be able 
to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ! " 

Christian truth admits the worst and offers the best, and 
discriminating between penitence and chagrin, as also 
between temerity and peace, it reconciles sorrow and aspira- 
tion by the cross. There is a great Deliverer, Who consents 
neither to credulity nor to incredulity, neither to presump- 
tion nor to despair. 

Pessimists only as to intrinsic evil, optimists only as to 
spiritual good, we face the wo which this Epistle to the 
Romans considers at its outset, so as to come to the suffi- 
ciency of that faith which in its eighth chapter bursts every 
barrier of space and time: "God hath included all under 
sin, that He might have mercy upon all. 

Sciences, arts, letters, laws, discoveries, conquests, battles, 
treaties, have not removed the curse of human sin nor its 
attendant pains. They have but patched the old garment. 
All politico-social devices are but temporary expedients, and 
in so far as they filch the conclusions of Christianity, to the 
neglect of its premises, they but wash the old wallow and 
gilt the dry-rot. 

Truth and falsehood are compacting, each after its own 
kind. The momentum of the beautiful and the base steadily 
increases. Each has its own axis of crystallization. The 
tares and the wheat grow to the harvest. The turbid world 
clears at the top, while at the bottom the sediment gathers 
thicker. Supernal and infernal forces more thoroly under- 
stand their antagonisms and compact their arrays. ' The 
morning cometh and also the night." 

The augmenting scrolls of history are written in moral 
characters, and our text's truth is the key to all their cipher. 
Two sets of interpretation there are; for there are two classes 
of interpreters: but true love is certified that nothing can be 
permanently good for the evil, nor evil for the good. No 
perverse subterfuge, nor fear at this present complexity can 
delay the " Anathema " or the " Maranatha." These stand 
76 



over against one another in " the King's writing, which no 
man can reverse." 

It is cowardly to refuse the costs and the conquests of 
personal fidelity. The cross of the divine Victor is atop of 
this grieving world. The great Samaritan is on his journey- 
ing. Of the Slough of Despond Bunyan wrote: "Even thro 
the very midst there are certain good substantial steps." 
To the loving, " love never faileth." Its warm current thro 
the commotions of time can no more be denied its way than 
storms can displace the gulf stream ! 

Neither petulance then, nor flatulence. Christ can quell 
the ravings of insane wills as once He exorcised the maniac 
of Gadara and seated him at His feet ! 

If your faith is in God's comprehension of you, not in 
yours of Him, you can surmount all menace and survive all 
alarm. Let things flow or ebb, the chain will hold to the 
anchor. The promises will not ravel. Sombre hours, like 
some birds of dingiest plumage, will burst into the brightest 
carol. The harvests need the night as well as the day to 
ripen them. It takes the whole quartet of the seasons to 
utter the fugal year. 

There is a certain half -pessimist ( of whom Mrs. Gum- 
midge is a type,) who has all the discomfort of the 
practice without the dignity of the philosophy. He takes 
the very trifles that pertain to him with an awful seriousness 
before which the sweet smile of courage is daunted. He 
hopes for the worst and enjoys poor health ! He always 
has a sore spot and a grievance, and he leaks with unpleas- 
antness. He sulks by preference and kicks by anarchic 
instinct. The source of all this biliousness is self-preoccupa- 
tion. The penalty of having no interests but one's own is 
moroseness. Play will sometimes lift the mind out of this 
lugubrious and inhospitable frame. Active love for others 
always will. If religion is not good to cure this jaundice 
then it is not good for anything. Honest hope should be a 
thoro antiseptic. Life, — you shall make it as you take it. 

77 



" From the self -same quarter of the sky, 
One saw ten thousand angels look and smile, 
Another saw as many demons frown." 

You may regard the pool of water at your feet as a muddy 
obstruction, or you may look into it, as into a Claude Lor- 
raine glass, and behold the reflected stars. 

" Some murmur, when their sky is clear 

And wholly bright to view, 
If one small speck of dark appears 

In their great heaven of blue. 
And some with thankful love We filled 

If but one streak of light, 
One ray of God's good mercy, gild 

The darkness of their night." 

Look where the light looks and you will see rainbows ! A 
close grip upon our text will carry you thro a myriad inci- 
dental dissatisfactions. Not too sanguine or too anxious, 
neither idle nor nervous, but always modestly brave, you 
shall find that ( even when tempted to say, with Jacob, " All 
these things are against me," ) the very thorns weave into a 
crown, and that the pillow of stones is the foot of a ladder ! 

" In the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat bread." God 
has you upon his lathe to make something of you. If you 
meet His love with your own, He covenants for you with the 
beasts of the field; the stones shall be in league with you; 
all laws shall further you; the stars shall fight for you; for 
He Who " telleth the number of the stars " is He Who 
" healeth the broken in heart and bindeth up their wounds." 

You cannot look behind, nor about, nor within, nor 
above, and think that the compensations of the All-true are 
either unmoral or insecure. This whole world, the instinct 
of faith, the insight of obedience, all the intimations of im- 
mortality, join in this unison: "To them that love God all 
things work together for good." Love is royal and indomit- 
able. Gideon's fleece and the dream of the tumbling cake 
of barley-bread have still an oracle. 
78 



Consider the parable of that " king of instruments,*' 
the organ. Perceive there the common consent of dis- 
tinct laws, hydraulic, dynamic, acoustic, their co-ordinate 
functions not confused, but all subordinated to the higher 
law of music. They all "work together," combining in 
a unity which is " perfected by that which every joint sup- 
plied." 

But here again the whole is greater than the sum of its 
visible parts. The intent is more than the contents. As 
mechanism alone, it stands unvocal, dumb. Its adaptation 
yields no tone. The organ cannot play itself ! Its sound- 
letters may make chords, its chords weave into the syntax 
of phrases, its periods and rhythms build into poems, lyric, 
dramatic, epic: but all this in not in the organ, but in the 
soul of the player. It is but instrumental to him, and no 
accident can ever waken a symphony from that impersonal 
metal and silent wood. But all in the twilight you listen 
while an unseen organist presses the keys and gathers pedals 
and stops to work his thought. Your heart feels and 
answers and you know that, invisible to you, one is there 
whose life, thro a common but ineffable language, reveals 
yourself and him ! 

What harmonies the Master of sound and meaning 
awakens ! How all secondary laws contribute to the 
" hidden soul " of music ! It is pathetic, sublime, and 
thro all the melted approaches, welding the counterpoint 
and subduing the devious modulations, you catch the imma- 
nent theme — broadening, increasing in purpose and depth, 
waxing to the great burst of trumpets and open diapasons. 
It is the Messiah ! A greater than Handel is here. Wait, 
heirs of salvation, you shall yet join that " Hallelujah 
Chorus." In mighty arcs, Eden and Babel and Egypt 
and Sinai and Canaan and Babylon and Bethlehem 
and Gethsemane and Calvary and Olivet — and all thro 
which love has wrought, " shall meet with joy in sweet 
Jerusalem ! " 

79 



Men of the Class of '98: 

You are about to join that procession of graduates which 
began here when this old century was young. The honest 
traditions of this school of men are all yours. You are 
theirs. All hours have high values that realize the heart. 
This hour has such values. The year that has seen the old 
Sixth Massachusetts go thro Baltimore, not as it went that 
19th of April, 1861, that has heard the northern hurrah 
greet the southern yell, with one united purpose for the cause 
of freedom and under the starlight of the flag of the morn- 
ing — this is no year for doubtful, but for daring, men. 
God's truth is always at war with some Spain. Maleficent 
strategems will, your lives long, summon you to resist and 
reduce them. I have sought to turn you away from an 
unscientific and an ungodly despondency, and I am sorry to 
make an end. I commit you and your ways to Samuel 
Kirkland's God. 

" I hold 
That it becomes no man to nurse despair : 
But in the teeth of clenched antagonisms 
To follow up the worthiest, till he die." 

Every one of you, whatever he has mis done so far, stands yet 
for a splendid possibility. Heed no clabber of words. Stand 
in with the constructors, not the censors. Instead of pulling 
back the freight of the years, push it along ! Gott mit uns I 

" Brother ! sing a loud psalm; 
Our hope's not forlorn; 

After darkness and twilight breaks forth the new morn ! 
Let the mad foe grow madder, 
Never quail ! Up the ladder ! 
Grasp the sword of the Lord and forward ! " 

You will come back and whisper in her ear, up on yonder 
hill, the " open sesame " of memory, and the names of those 
who one by one can come back no more, and then, God 
grant it to you all, there shall be another class day, in the 
land where it is always June ! 

80 



THE STATION OF OBEDIENCE 

TO THE GRADUATING CLASS, JUNE 25, 1899 

Go thou thy way till the end be; for thou shalt rest and stand in thy lot at the end 
of thy days. Daniel 7 :13. 

For nearly eighty years Daniel was prime minister of that 
Chaldean monarchy which in his prophetic vision was the 
golden head, whereof Babylon, magnificent with the spoils 
of subjugated peoples, was the surpassing crown. Upon that 
capital long ago the word of Isaiah was precisely fulfilled: 
" The golden city has ceased." The " beauty of pride " is 
overthrown. Over her " perpetual desolations " twenty-five 
centuries have trailed, and palace and battlement, warrior 
and sword, wizard and king, crumble in common dust. 

Of all that pomp and power, only the name lives now — a 
seal of the severity of God and a synonym of self-destruc- 
tive iniquity, a name that is an appropriate epitaph for any 
city or people that seeks but self. Babylon's very shame is 
chiefly memorable for her place in Hebrew prophecy and for 
her association with him who, tho her counsellor, was the 
liegeman of the one untarnishable crown and of the only 
sceptre that shall never fall. These twelve chapters are a 
book of obediences, beginning with the story of those sturdy 
youths who, far from home, were true to their upbringing 
and would not defile themselves with the idol-blessed meat 
and wine. 

Of these four, to Daniel God gave especial wisdom, " more 
than all the magicians and astrologers in the realm." He 
" found favor and tender love " from the king's steward; but 
he was a " man greatly beloved " of God. He was the John 
of the Old Testament and Babylon was his Patmos, where 
God unrolled for his recording the divine map of time, its 
rising and sinking empires, His exact advent Who should 
" take the dominion under the whole heaven " — and the 

81 



ages to be, on till " the time of the end." The panorama 
he could not comprehend, and of his tutor-angel he seeks 
the issue — " searching what or what manner of time the 
Spirit did point unto " — the suffering, the glory. But 
" not unto themselves did they minister these things." 
Even a Daniel must wait. Philosophical curiosity is not 
met. As God's scribe he must write and seal the book. 
The pledged fulfilment is but sketched — Providence must 
write in the commentary of fact. He, too, saw but " in a 
mirror, enigmatically." The perspective and vista is clouded 
even to the prophet. He cannot understand all mysteries. 
The lantern is not the day. The fidelity is more than pre- 
science. Here, too, all our queries find at once their solace 
and rebuke. " After long grief and pain " our bewilderment 
asks: " What shall be the end ? " and still the heavenly an- 
swer is: "Go thou thy way." So once the disciples — 
" Tell us when shall these things be ? " and so say we, too 
often, only to hear that wise refusal — "It is not for you to 
know the times and the seasons which the Father hath hid 
in His own power." 

The impenetrability of the future is of grace. The dis- 
count of our bains and successes would foil their disciplines. 
Amid ten thousand uncertainties of our forecast, our Guard- 
ian's voice and presence is better than knowledge. 

There is no confusion in His plan, nor delay in His per- 
formance. He does not deviate or halt. Every atom and 
act, every being and event, in that section of eternity 
which we call time, has its appointed way and lot. Crea- 
tion was not launched in vain: it is no splintered derelict, 
adrift upon the waves dappled by a dying moon. All worlds 
and wills are helio-centric, and what we think inscrutable 
works out the expected end. Largest or least, everywhere 
loyal order answers royal mandate. He " metes out the 
heavens with a span " and guides every fleck of vapor that 
floats in those depths. The breeze is His barge and the tor- 
nados are His chariot. " He sends forth the snow like wool " 
82 



and places each hesitating flake. He plants the forests and 
unrolls their every leaf. He overrules the empires and the 
transmigrations of men, and the "very hairs of their heads are 
all numbered." " He hath measured the waters in the hollow 
of His hand." The perpetual surfs break upon lonely 
coasts; but each drop goes its own way, and every grain of 
the rearranging sands maintains the equilibrium of the 
great globe. 

Enumeration pants before the lavishment and wonder of 
form and force. Law, infinite and infinitesimal ! Change 
everywhere, nowhere chance ! Comparison is swallowed up 
of awe before Him Who counts the nations as a " drop in 
the bucket," and " taketh up the isles as a very little thing." 

Weights and measures drop from our hands as microscope 
answers telescope, from either lens deep calling unto deep in 
an antiphon of worship, while the shechinah glows between 
inmost and outmost creation. High vision only multiplies 
the inexhaustible. Stare with forty-inch eye into the stellar 
abysses, conquer more worlds, till science, forspent, weeps, 
there every sun and system goes its several way. The 
boundless void is full with a Presence ! The comets that 
trail their golden fleece thro the sheer depths finity can 
never dredge, are no runaways ! He shepherds those flocks, 
and hangs the gems, trembling from His touch, as the lamps 
of His palace. From monad to nebula, no system is too 
great or satellite too small to be unheeded in the balance of 
obedience. But the realm of conscious intelligence is higher, 
deeper. Mind is the occupant. Being is the most amaz- 
ing. These are the mansions of the Father of Spirit. The 
archangelic serenity of freedom and peace is there. Into 
that heaven of obedience where privilege and duty are 
one, man with his birthright of personality may also 
come. Of all the circles of life God is the final centre. 
There is that about this little star that makes it " first in 
night's diadem." Where love is the warden there can be no 
collisions. One seraph stands as a page close to the white 

83 



throne, one speeds as a messenger to some far world. One 
sentinels a city, and one carries a beggar to Abraham's 
bosom. But each, joyful in his assignment, knows that 
fidelity is glory. Gabriel, if God said so, would count it as 
worthy to watch the bed of a believing leper as to marshal 
in burning row the sunny legion of seraphim ! 

The lesson is as personal to us as it is boundless. It is 
strong and saline. As among the armies of Heaven, so for 
every inhabitant of Earth — " Go thy way to the end " is 
the will of God. 

Prophet or child, there is no less nor more. " One after 
this manner and another after that." Each of you has a 
path to which your Maker points no other feet. In life, as 
in an orchestra, " there are many kinds of voices and none 
of them is without signification." Each task and trial is 
enough and not more, with grace sufficient and none to 
spare. The patient teacher does not turn a new leaf until 
the first is mastered, tho it be dogs-eared and tear-stained. 

" My bark is wafted to the strand 
By breath divine — 
And on the helm there rests a hand 
Other than mine. 

One who has known in storms to sail 

I have on board; 
Above the raging of the gale 

I hear the Lord. 

He holds me when the billows smite — 

I shall not fall. 
If sharp 'tis short, if long 'tis light; 

He tempers all." 

Our lot may seem a chance; but its disposing is with Him, 
and to envy another's opportunity or to criticise our own 
is to set up that lie of self- autonomy which interprets 
honor by condition. He who appoints our ways knows our 
best good, and what seems the barrenest spot in our lives, 
under the irrigation of tears may bloom with more than 
May and bear the peaceable fruits of righteousness. The 
84 



alluvial years witness strange issues. God's motherliness 
does not indulge the whims that endanger character, grant- 
ing all the candy we cry for, and with medicine that is often 
bitter to take He cures the aches brought on by our self-in- 
dulgences. It is displacement from God's way that makes 
all the petulant confusion of this strange Earth. In man's 
caprice alone, amid the full concords of Nature, is struck a 
tuneless and jarring note. Resenting his environment and 
inverting his dependency, all his bitter heart-burnings come 
from his wayward will. The coronation of desire brings in 
the whole train of distresses. Passion forfeits peace. To 
" go our ways " reverently and " stand in our lot " weaves all 
life, and that in silver woof, upon a warp of gold. This is 
the love that never faileth. It gives initiative and evolves 
persistency. The full acceptance of God's control makes 
endurance an active virtue. It is the pull of the wires upon 
a piano frame, their resistance to high strain, that holds 
them to their music. Eagerly, wistfully, we seek to surpass 
our limitations; but God does not disclose the event. Better 
than that. He secures it. He steers the ship, and it shall 
clear the foggy channel, for all the reefs. He who sets our 
tasks will not forget the love that accepted, and the labor 
that to level of its best attempted them. Thus we learn. 
Life gives us certain exercises with "figured bass"; but 
when by such helps we master something of harmony, and 
deeper yet, something of the principles of form, we can man- 
age chords, progressions and resolutions over whose elusive 
intricacy we once could have cried! No function is second- 
ary to the spirit of obedience. The gun-deck is as noble as 
the quarter-deck. It was not only the men in the turrets, 
but the men at the engines, that cleared the sea at Santiago, 
and back of them the builders and machinists who had set 
every bolt and pinion in its place, and hammered true each 
rivet that held tight the iron lips of the boilers. 

It is obstinate fidelity in minor duties — in the " one hour 
subjects " — that graduates " high honor " at the last. This 

85 



surmounts the temptation of the sallow and surly moods, 
and all the mongrel theories of diluted epicureanism, the 
violence of a greedy will, and the torpor of a false modesty. 

The pigments, umber and amber, splotched upon the 
palette, have that in them that mastery can use to paint 
Madonnas. Out of the rough quarry- block Thorwaldsens 
can chisel immortal form. And life is to every one of us 
but the pedestal, the canvas, where the soul may — must — 
somehow utter its ideal, be that Fra Angelico's angel or 
Bougereau's satyr. Ah, that we may not talk Corregio and 
live chromo ! For it is by reality, not by poising and pos- 
turing, that character becomes statuesque. Conscience 
toward the unseen and eternal drives away the attitudes of 
self -consciousness . 

It was a whole result of truth in genius, when Phidias re- 
plied to one who chid his pains over a part of his work 
always to remain unviewed: "The gods see and must be 
satisfied." Few things rescued from the flux of the ages 
have a nobler pathos than the form of that sentinel who 
stood to his post in Pompeii while the ashes fell ! Duty ! 

" As the bird trims her to the gale, 

I trim myself to the storm of time, 
I man the rudder, reef the sail, 

Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime : 
'Lowly faithful, banish fear, 

Right onward drive unharmed; 
The port, well worth the cruise, is near, 

And every wave is charmed.' " 

The man after God's heart is the man who minds. There 
is nothing archaic and cryptic about Daniel as an instance. 
He, and every like soul, " rests and stands in his lot at the 
end." There is a grander pantheon than Westminster. By 
a sublime conservation of energy what has been truly good 
is unwastingly great. It may escape history, but it works 
on in the chemistry of time. Its ozone continues. We are 
sharing the momentum and entering into the labors of those 
86 



who saved past epochs from decay. We are mainly the lega- 
tees, not of the famous few, but of the anonymous myriads 
who have piled up the coral island from beneath the sea, and 
who in the dark wrought with a perpendicular instinct. 

The " mute Miltons " are not inglorious — they are part 
of the organ whose music is not yet opened. 

" Ah, if our souls but poise and swing, 
Like the compass in its brazen ring, 
Ever level and ever true 
To the toil and the task we have to do, 
We shall sail securely, and safely reach 
The Fortunate Isles, on whose shining beach 
The sights we see and the sounds we hear 
Will be those of joy and not of fear." 

It is not canonization that is great, but saintship, and that 
which makes it is the daily syntax and maturing idiom of 
docility toward the God Who owns us all. It is a rough 
path may be, but it is well blazed by sharp axes. Doubt- 
less Moses wondered why he was called to spend forty years 
out of the centre of his life as an Arabian shepherd ! For 
this had he mastered Egyptian lore ? Must he thus wait 
while Israel grovelled under taskmasters and acquired the 
slavish mind ? Yes, in Midian, even Moses, and because 
Moses, must find the school where in his one life was pre- 
paring the emancipation of a people, where in meditative 
and germinal years the lawgiver of ages was himself master- 
ing submission. 

Oh, how fully, upon life after life, is our text illuminated ! 
Which of you would have elected the disciplines of Bedford 
jail ? Yet there was one who, persecuted and silenced, 
made that " den " the House of Interpreter, — a Beulah 
mountain. That which there he wrought made it a more 
notable dwelling than Lambeth palace. Which of you can 
tell, or cares that he cannot tell, who was just then Arch- 
bishop of Canterbury ? One John Bunyan has outweighed 
all the primates England ever had ! 

87 



Coarse cradles and rough tutoring oftenest shelter and 
train the most effective personalities. 

How then dare you, dare I, so plunder the future as to 
renounce responsibility to God's control of us ? Your life 
whirls on into unknown distances, you can see the landscape 
but sidewise, but the eye of the Engineer looks right on, 
whether you sleep or wake. Shall ignorance meddle 
with the intricate mechanism, shall madness change the 
switches in the night ? What do we know of the complex 
bearings of one day, how much less can we foresee the lead- 
ings of a lifetime ! He who lights all that chandelier of 
stars, listens to and loves to answer the child's petition 
that well becomes us all: "I pray Thee, Lord, my soul 
to keep." 

" Far better in its place the lowliest bird 

Should sing aright to Him the lowliest song, 
Than that a seraph strayed should take the word, 
And sing His glory wrong." 

" Blessed is he that waiteth and cometh to the end." It 
is a busy, beautiful world, and good to live in. God's con- 
trol makes the living lovely, the good- night peaceful, the 
waking blessed. 

O Thou Ancient of Days, send out Thy light and truth 
to lead us all ! Let not one of our souls be cast down or 
disquieted because we do not now know all that Thou doest. 
We shall know hereafter and be satisfied when we awake in 
Thy likeness. While many run to and fro and knowledge is 
increased, may we begin our wisdom in Thy fear and crown 
it with Thy favor. Increase our faith. Curb our impatient 
wills. Sustain our needy hearts. Plant us by the rivers 
that make glad the city of God. For Thy name's sake order 
our lot and guide our growth in it, today, tomorrow, and 
forever more ! Amen. 

Men of the Class of '99 : 

To you have I said thus much already, and yet closer 
88 



would I come to you in a few words more. Forty-five of 
you arrive at the line. But two larger, and they but slightly 
larger, classes have graduated here. You have had upon 
your roll in all sixty-five names, six you have inherited from 
earlier classes, eight you have bequeathed to classes still in 
College. One, Hildreth, whom you loved, has finished his 
mortal work and " passed to where beyond these voices 
there is peace." 

Your record is one of work, of good- will, and of excep- 
tional scholarly average. You have been faithful to the 
standards that keep manhood clean and honor bright. 

Your instructors hold you as friends and believe you hold 
them such. We are sure you will be working-bees, not 
drones, in the great hive of human life, not men of flighty 
impulse, but as steady to your task as the hour-hand of the 
clock. We believe in you. 

Do you remember that 1799 was the date when the first 
recitations were held on our old hill ? 

It was a hundred years ago, 

Upon the crest that crowns the slope, 
They did what they could never know 

Who opened there the doors of hope. 

Scholar and soldier, man and saint, 

Our Kirkland made what naught could move, 

And from that cradle rude and quaint 
Has grown the Hamilton we love. 

It was a day of little things, 

And poverty and doubt were near, 
And tho his prayers had sturdy wings 

He could not guess the hundredth year. 

He struck the plow in fallow soil, 

He sowed the seed with open hand, 
The God of Wisdom owned his toil, 

And where he wrought and sleeps we stand. 

And still shall stand when we are gone 

The widening walls and ampler task, 
And the good College shall live on 

With more than we can think or ask. 

89 



Thou God Whose mercies never cease, 

While runs a second century, 
Let our high beacon towers increase; 

We trust their lamps of truth to Thee. 

The College has stood, and stands, and will stand, firm as 
the integrity of these primeval hills, upon her face the vision 
of perpetual morning and all the sunsets at her back. The 
Observatory shall again search the stars, and the Chapel 
spire shall ever point beyond them. The sciences of sense 
and of the soul shall walk hand in hand thro the long to- 
morrow. The trees will grow, noble buildings rise, the 
campus hum with increasing life, but to the last it will be 
your own — your mother's fireside. The iron tongue of the 
bell shall ring golden notes of welcome. Changes shall be 
evolutions, not revolutions — growths, not decays. 

Tune your hearts to the old key once more before you go 
— that loyal gratitude, in which you in your time, shall tell 
the fame and promote the advancement of your College. 
There will be an echo in the mellow air, room at the table, 
always and only yours. The place with all its paths, its 
romance of your youth, will be a goodly tryst long after the 
voices of the Faculty you knew are heard no more. 

We take your hands hard. Go your way, and at the end 
of all the days stand in your lot. For He said it for you 
also, — "I am the way, and the truth, and the life." 



90 



THE BETTER WAY 

TO THE GRADUATING CLASS, JUNE 24, 1900 

I pray not that Thou shouldst take them from the world : but that Thou shouldst 
keep them from the evil. John 17:15. 

These immediate chapters of the fourth gospel are, of all 
places in the New Testament, those in which we come clos- 
est to the Messiah. 

Here, hiding as " in a pavilion from the strife of tongues," 
the heart can hear itself listen. Sophism and doubt are 
silenced and answered, before this most divine and most 
human revealing of a Saviour's soul. 

Here Love finds its utmost speech and takes that eleven, 
and all who will go with them, into its innermost confidence. 

In this sublime intercession we overhear the very mind of 
Love itself, and vital and perpetual things, ennobling and 
surpassing language, are told so plain that words can never 
increase them. This mediatorial prayer not only goes to 
the quick of motive and feeling, it not only brims with per- 
sonal and passionate affection, it also sketches the whole 
character and purpose of those who are to become the rep- 
resentatives and messengers of their Master — gives their 
errand, their secret of power, their antagonisms and perils, 
their pains, their peace. 

The word " world " is deeply instructive in its iteration 
thro fourteen clauses. Indeed, we have to go carefully not 
to lose its force. The teaching as to the " world " (ampli- 
fied in John's first letter ) prompts us to distinguish the 
varied sense it has thro all the Testament. 

Here it has mainly the special sense of denoting the gen- 
eral multitude of men, with their sphere and aims, as apart 
from those who are chosen into and who choose utterly the 
faithful fellowship of Christ as their Lord and Life. 

And this petition is permanent in individualizing and col- 

91 



lecting all those, everywhere and always, who are the suc- 
cessors in the faith of that little company of followers. For 
them, severally and all together, its every accent and term. 

I speak now in hope that no man of this company would 
forfeit his possible share in a Redeemer's invocation, nor 
undo by one iota its blessed bond. For you, or not for you, 
as you decide it, this prayer endures. 

We may be sure that such a supplication omits nothing 
necessary and includes nothing unimportant. What the Son 
of Man sought, for all who will to be His, contains the 
abundant legacy of manhood. 

And our text carries us to the very centre. Superiority, 
and not isolation. Use, without abuse. The highest life, 
lived tranquilly and bravely amid strenuous conditions. All 
terrestrial things interpreted by celestial ends. In the world 
and not of it ! 

Not absenteeism but transcendence, neither abstraction 
nor distraction. This was Christ's own way, and by those 
who would have all or none of Earth He was equally mis- 
understood and misclassified. The task and the joy, the 
rejection and the victory, go together, and the equation of 
loyalty to His way must have all its terms complete. 

Not common forms but common motives, not identical 
circumstances but unity in character, is what creates the 
sympathy and the alliance between those who surpass the 
superficial substitute of uniformity, in true unity of the 
spirit. 

Christ's own mind and method toward all visible and 
social surroundings, is what substantially joins all who are 
truly His. This is the bond of their peace. 

This great request in our behalf cogently teaches that 
the super- mundane life is not yet the extra-mundane — that 
it is not maintained by a thought exterior to its condition- 
ings of sense and sin, but superior to these. Waywardness 
and outwardness are to be surmounted by inwardness. 

Surrender and sin lie not in surroundings but in contami- 

92 



nation. We can squeeze it right to this, — not taken but 
kept I 

" All its pleasures and its griefs, 
All its shallows and rocky reefs, 
All the secret currents, that flow 
With such resistless undertow, 
And lift and drift with terrible force 
The will from its moorings and its course." 

When we meditate these dangers of the wide sea it seems 
easier not to venture. It is easier. But smooth roads 
make small men. Temporarily it is safer to avoid risks; 
but temporizing is the tune of feebleness. Monasticism 
gives up the fight in preferring seclusion to exclusion. An 
honest and brave manhood does not let that contemplation 
supersede action which rather should stimulate it. That 
" fugitive and cloistered virtue " failed of the very purity 
which it idealized — failed because it fled the war. 

I suppose we all know what it is to avoid circumstances 

— to pray that the uncomfortable particular thorn may be 
withdrawn — that difficulty and pain may cease — or even, 
like Elijah, to say " Let me die, for I am not better than 
my fathers." Each of us more than he admits has Becky 
Sharp's theory, — " I think I could be good on £5,000 a 
year ! " 

We praise endurance and preach it to others: but when 
our turn comes we flinch. We want to learn obedience in 
some other than the grammar school of suffering, and resent 
the processes by which God would get the world out of us 
by keeping us in it. 

But it is not by withdrawal, but by courage in the face of 
all the world can do or deny, that we magnify the power of 
grace to keep. " In your patience ye shall win your souls " 

— make them really your own ! Absent-mindedness can 
not do the business. They who, like our Intercessor, carry 
Heaven with them, challenge all horizontal things with the 
confidence that God will give truth the victory in a fair fight. 

93 



Strength lies not in avoiding the enemy but in sticking 
close to the leader; for nothing will surrender to a force that 
is always falling back. Christ was a man among men — not 
locally but spiritually " separate from sinners." The com- 
mon life of the busy and bleeding and wicked and yearning 
world was His arena. 

That goodness which would thrive by getting into a lit- 
tle room and fastening all windows and doors, will suffocate. 
The Christian man will be forced constantly to his base of 
supplies : but he can be in the largest sense a man of affairs. 
He will, if he is a good soldier, be more anxious about the 
ammunition wagon than the ambulance. He will not pray 
to be taken out of the harness, but to die with the tugs 
straight ! 

A John Bright knows how to keep himself unspotted from 
the world. Statesmanship need not be statecraft. There 
are filthy politicians, nevertheless politics is a noble calling. 
There are shyster lawyers, and editors who come cheap, and 
time-serving, apologetic preachers, and business men whose 
morals are frightfully decollete : but " go not after their way." 

Temptation like contagion must always have some re- 
sponse in its subject. It is not contact with worldliness 
but affinity with it, and consent, that pulls a soul to pieces. 

Here lie the life and power of what we call the Church. 
The salt must be applied. The light must shine not under 
a bushel nor a bed ! To be " carried to the skies " is no 
concern of yours yet. When Elijah has swept Carmel then 
God will send him His own carriage, but not to any juniper 
bush ! Men need men — inspired, inspiriting men. You 
are here to help — you are equipped to serve — to spend 
your last ounce of energy for Him who loved the world be- 
cause it could be saved ! Exploit it — it will exploit you ! 
Your fellows, right on this planet, need muscles, not crutches 
— courage, not cold-pieces ; and no man gives until he gives 
himself ! What a man has, too often declares the price the 
world has paid for him. What a man does for the world, 

94 



measures what he would be worth. Once there was a Man 
Who, — but that's the Gospel ! 

The problem of Christian progress is not to get good men 
away from the world, but to get them close to it. The less 
worldliness there is in a man the readier will he be to come to 
close quarters, where others, weakly good, dare not take the 
seeming risks of fidelity. It is one thing to read medicine, or 
even to take it, and quite another to practice it. We are 
afraid of catching something, and that is where the epi- 
demic gets us ! 

To avoid those grapples that put us to the strain confesses 
weakness. For instance, it is because men's civic principles 
are so brittle ( not so good ) that city politics often become 
the puddle and trough of the loathsome. Alleged respecta- 
bility disowns right itself when it votes the regular ticket of 
partisan lepers, who "fear not God nor regard man." Our 
sewer-scented municipalities need less cologne and more 
chloride of lime. Schemes to evade the world must always 
be less efficient than plans to master it. That was a bright 
bit of Rufus Choate's wit, when to one who asked after his 
health he replied that he " had used up his constitution and 
was living on the by-laws." And it is when we have run out 
of inspiration that we idolize organization as such and trust 
in appliances. For processes of mere manipulation often 
strangle the truth, and good causes are smothered by pon- 
derous committees. 

One of the surest ways to get a thing done is to do it your- 
self. Saul strutted about in his defensive armor while 
David, with simpler equipment, took the offensive. Good- 
ishness guards its rear — Gospel grit pushes its front. It was 
Grant who said: " When this army is beaten it won't need 
any supplies." 

We are too worldly to dare to meet worldliness and con- 
front evil right where it lives. We want to segregate good- 
ness ; Christ would colonize it. He sends men, as He sends 
nations, to open up the world and let in the day. The 

95 



cleansing of one Havana does more to purge the world than 
all the quarantine regulations ever framed. Our divine 
Pattern would save us by having us save others. 

Any company of men fancying itself " good," that sits 
and harangues itself about its " privileges ", is as unreal and 
spectacular as a theatre, and its exercises, even tho called 
religious, are mere sentimental vaporings. 

" I pray not that thou shouldst take them out of the 
world. ' Christianity is far more than a mere protest. 

The evil of " the world " — the root of all evil, which our 
Lord prayed that we might be kept from, is selfishness. It 
may be orthodox or not — Pharisee or Sadducee — little 
odds which, so it merely theorizes truth and but depicts 
duty. First Christ prayed against the evil world, then He 
died for it ! 

He not merely prescribed the cure, He became the cure. 
We, dainty, greedy, ungrateful, underrate the responsiveness 
of men, at large and in detail, to the power which in self- 
sacrifice overcomes evil with good. 

All men instinctively distinguish between real human love 
which needs no other defense, and self-love exhibiting and 
defending itself in condescension. If one holds himself apart 
as super-precious and important, if he makes helpfulness an 
incident rather than an aim, if he merely praises the efforts 
of others, he thus becomes a part of the incubus. 

For if you are not a lifter you are an addition to the load, 
and in the light of the very Gospel be it firmly said, that if we 
are too good to be used we are not good for anything ! 

And why should any one of you shun the suffering sinful- 
ness of this struggling and piteous world ? Why should any 
of you try to climb up by using those who are down ? 

Reverently we may paraphrase our text, — "I pray not to 
put them in Heaven, but to put Heaven into them. ' The 
Prince of Life anchored His Gospel in the world by bringing 
it in Person. He so took up His residence here that the 
common everyday people of Syria heard Him gladly. He 



did it and we must do it, or cease to pray, — " Thy will be 
done on Earth as it is in Heaven." 

Would any of you be such a man ? Nay, will you not all 
be such ? In the world, yet none of it. For it, not from it. 
The ship floats in the water until the water gets into the 
ship. It is not location, but relation, that shall differentiate 
you from the element in which you are placed. Your pro- 
bation hinges there. 

Emancipation from the things seen and temporal is in 
deliverance from the world's spirit, philosophy, temper, lust, 
— not from its problems. 

It often takes sharp surprises and bitter sufferings to 
make one aware how much he has allowed himself to 
become involved in the world's pretentious bankruptcy. 
Meet life now in its demands, not run from it, and save 
yourself too sharp a shock and too bitter a pang. Pray 
yourself the prayer Christ prayed for all disciples. 

For all men do practically pray something. Some pray — 
Give me the world — the pride of life, — and success be- 
comes an optimism which angers at any contradiction of its 
dream; failure, a pessimism angry at both rebuke and remedy. 

Or some pray — Take it away — Take me away. 

But third, and hardest and noblest and surest, is the 
prayer, — Keep me in it and yet keep me from it. 

Agur's prayer was prudent, — " Give me neither poverty 
nor riches"; but deeper, wiser, were it to say to God, — 
As Thou wilt, give me either poverty or riches. 

Men of the Class of 1900 : 

Would you indeed be men, learn a noble non-conform- 
ity to all patterns save One. Make yourselves by His help 
a known quantity for good in a world where you are bidden 
to be laborers together with God. 

" Ah, what a wondrous thing it is 
To note how many wheels of toil 
One thought, one word, can set in motion." 

97 



Count nothing small that you do bravely to make the 
world nearer to what God wills it to be. 

Neither antiquated nor new-fangled, meet what each year 
brings you, sure that in all the flux of your time there are 
fixed stars by which to sail to a desired haven. 

The century in which you were born has a mighty mes- 
sage to the century in which you shall die: but Christ's 
message is one for them both, and for you all. Remember 
that manly man who a year ago was your teacher, and not 
less a friend. Cleave to such men as Grosvenor Hopkins 
was. Strive to be such men, and pass down from this divide 
of your years into the valleys where rare harvests invite the 
reapers. 

In the memory of the College that mothers you, recognize 
the inspirations of her historic past. Whatever she has been 
to you, she may be more and will be more to you, as you 
look back to the friendships, the unconscious tuitions, the 
happy reveries and the prophetic dreams. Once, twice, 
thrice more, all of you together, and then never again this 
side the war! May your Lord and Master "fulfil for you 
every desire of goodness and every work of faith, with 
power.'' I do not want to let you go : but all the rest must 
speak unspoken. 



98 



SPECIALISM AND SYMPATHY 

TO THE GRADUATING CLASS, JUNE 23, 1901 

Love is the fulfilment of law. Romans 13 :10. 

My purpose is to speak of two aspects of all mental earn- 
estness as they combine in a true theory of education; then 
of this true theory of education as it increases personal char- 
acter and vital influence. 

I would restate and if I can reimpress some fundamental 
principles in which you are already well begun, and in which 
I know you must continue to advance if you are to be men of 
discrimination and efficiency. Two things I shall try to 
urge as mutually indispensable in the real development of 
both mental and moral life, — Specialism and Sympathy. 
Each consideration touches present and permanent problems 
in education, as this in its means and ends is concerned 
with that harmony between capacity and energy which 
unifies and intensifies life. 

From these two descriptives I would attempt to cleanse 
some obscurities, and would carry your convictions toward 
that comprehensive view of them which is instantly related 
to manly growth in both knowledge and grace. The correct 
vision of these two duties of the mind must open a generous 
and inviting vista, and invite you to proceed with that 
honest caution which ministers to the surest courage. 

Emerson somewhere wrote that " The poorest poem is 
better than the best criticism upon it." How much easier 
it is to write poor poetry than to write good criticism there 
are doubtless here as many as several who know well ! But 
I suppose he meant not that, but that creation is nobler in 
kind than inspection. And I take a little comfort as I try 
not merely to construe words but to construct an idea and 
an ideal whose sum shall be just to its each part. " Mixing 
things ( said Mrs. Carlyle ) is the great bad. 



Law is rational order and its interpretation. Science is 
that careful and arranged appreciation of this order which 
classifies and ratifies every kind of attainable knowledge. 
It is information philosophised into that mental result which 
reads out of the fact what the Supreme Mind has written 
into it. It is a recognition of reality far anterior to itself. 

Love goes deeper. It is of the will. It gathers all feeling 
into consent. It establishes voluntary relation to that wis- 
dom which thro law addresses life. It is intelligent affinity, 
— the soul's Amen to the divine Yea. It incorporates law 
and transcends it. Law teaches and invites the response of 
life thro love, and love is life filling law full. 

Now Specialism is the legal method of the brain under 
man's double limitation in both ability and time. 

Divide et impera is its behest. It detaches one single 
range of research or enterprise. It is particular, focal, and 
individualistic. As to one thing it would know all that can 
be known or do all that can be done. It concentrates its 
power upon a point, and by intense abstraction and an ever 
closer subdivision and analysis it pushes the wary atom to 
its lair. The specialist sinks one shaft. He gazes thro a 
tube at his single object. In art or affairs he is utterly de- 
voted to his one investigation. In whatsoever realm, the 
instincts of the honest specialist are vigilance and thoroness; 
eagerly he plods, slowly he hastens. His errand is not to 
impose theories but to uncover facts. Patiently he prepares 
the way. His function is not to plead a case but to gather 
the evidence. His attitude has been typical of all the learn- 
ing of our time, as it has been the note of all the vast and 
masterful expansion of our mechanic arts. 

But Specialism is hemi-spherical. If we would not be 
"ever learning and never able to come to a knowledge of the 
truth," we must know that life is not a circle but an ellipse. 
That which mind perceives is one of the two focii — the 
mind which perceives is the other. These bivalve parts are 
inter-regulative and co-efficient. 

100 



Curiosity without co-ordination is aimless and futile. In 
all factoring, analysis is a full half: but it is only half; the 
other half is synthesis. The one must distinguish and the 
other must combine. And the mood and effort in which the 
synthesis is realized is Sympathy. 

Analysis unties, synthesis unites. The means are instru- 
mental to this end. The portion seeks the sum. In a 
creation where all separate things have this supreme affinity, 
namely, that they exist in one total, all facts are gregarious. 
They interlace and are reticulated. To dissect and there 
quit them is to destroy. The severalty can only be under- 
stood by the jointure. The community of interest is what 
makes the "effectual working together" of the manifold 
items, and so makes them intelligible. All suffer and rejoice 
interactively. "The whole creation (and because a whole) 
travaileth in pain together." 

Sympathy cares for what all parts share in the sum. It 
is vital; for life is concerned with the total unity of a total 
world. Study the staves, study the hoops that clasp them, 
so as to study the heads, and at last the barrel. You must 
build as well as carve — if you are to fill full the barrel. 
The mere addition of these various shreds will not give you 
the result; for assorting is not consorting: but their proper 
combination will, as each gives and receives meaning to and 
from the purposed end. Here is one more vindication of 
my pet paradox, that except in the abstraction of mathe- 
matics the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts. 
Mere juxtaposition is barren. A football team is more than 
eleven players. Our nation is more than forty-five states. 
You are more than your aggregate faculties. A sentence is 
more than the words it assembles. The * law of the spirit of 
life ' is more than the separate activities which it uses. 

After all the statics and dynamics under which your bar- 
rel is built, the question of what shall fill it is cardinal. 
Remember to be good coopers: but remember to be more 
than coopers. And consider that a barrel must at least con- 

101 



tain enough to be worth freightage. It pays to carry a 
"fulfilment" of flour from Minneapolis to the seaboard; 
but the same space full of shavings would mulct the consig- 
nee. Better be a keg of dry powder than a cask of putty ! 

Sympathy is telepathy. All things and all men are inter- 
dependent. Relation designates co-responsibility. This 
rescues every detail from incoherency. Its high kinship is 
the nobility of the instant and the instance. To forget the 
implication of any part of anything is to strip it of meaning 
and to make it a sherd. The exaggeration of individualism 
is its secession and defeat. Your Latin teaches you that its 
synonym is egotism, your Greek that it is idiocy. 

You must inspect in order to contract. The strands are in 
order to the cable, — the day in order to the year. Sympa- 
thy does not proceed toward a quotient, but a multiplicand. 

" To see life steadily and see it whole " is to know that 
man is naturally federative, and that no fact or fellow is 
alien from any man's endowment in God. 

While Specialism all by itself is isolar, gibbous, sexless, 
barren; Sympathy, with all that is and can be, brings us into 
fellowship with the ' One law, one love, one element.' It is 
the pollen of life. It fertilizes all capacity. Law and love 
are thus necessary complements. Finally, they are not 
merely harmonious but vitally identical. The whole man, 
the integral man, the man whom they together have freed 
from astigmatism, uses them as interchangeable terms, and 
sings with Browning, — 

" All's love ; but all's law,"— 

and so to the higher chemistry gives them one symbol ! 

Not omniscience then, which is the modern gnosticism, is 
your goal: but unity of feeling with every other child of the 
one Father, and the appreciation that of that unity the 
unity of all the tangible and optical world is the parable 
and pedestal. Even if Specialism could ever become omnis- 
cience, Sympathy would still be omnipotence. 

102 



If you follow me, you cannot think that I am disparaging 
analysis. I exalt it, in the name of that synthesis which is 
its warrant and its crown. They are the two sides of the 
one coin, obverse and reverse, from the same mint. They 
are the bi-sexual reason! 

Unwarped, unthwarted, every true and severe task, of the 
mind or of the hand, of study or of action, leads from the 
particular to the general, from the mechanical to the vital, 
thro the rational to the emotional. The fulfilment suffuses 
the process. We are fuel for that fire. The Way, the Truth 
and the Life speaks, and our hearts burn within us. So are 
we fashioned. A full connection and circuit, and that which 
is not of the wire leaps thro it ! For all science, of the 
senses or of the soul, is in order that we may realize life and 
Him who grants and guides it. In this half-time, so much 
dominated by the apparent, we are to be delivered from 
considering ourselves as mere cogs and pinions of an appara- 
tus, by those spatial affinities which convince us that the 
enginery is less than the engineer, and the track less than 
the destination. 

" Two worlds are ours," and thereto even the " flower in 
the crannied wall " is a witness. Between the outmost and 
the inmost — between " the starry worlds and the con- 
science " — the Presence ! 

Sympathy then, — that co-feeling which makes kin, com- 
mon-weal, catholicity of heart, the whole as the point of 
view, — this I urge. 

It is more than amount of knowledge, it is motive. 
Motive more than locomotive ! Accuracy not for the arrow's 
sake, but for the archer's. 

So may you be delivered, whether in the laboratory or 
the closet or the factory or the field or the chair, from the 
idolatry of your particular topic or sub-topic, nor hold any 
of your acquisitions as a self-sufficing end. Each is for all. 
Regard for one's own segment of industry, iff it becomes 
antipathetic or even apathetic toward the tasks of others 

103 



will greatly diminish your value even on your own half -acre; 
while a genuine human interest in the relation of your 
knowledge to another's, of your search to another's search, 
will encourage both him and you. Always there are others! 
In every sphere of man's attempts, large-heartedness is the 
antidote for that over-concentration which in ignoring other 
parts frustrates its own, 

Let it be Government. The durable patriotism is not 
parochial nor provincial, nor even merely continental: but 
it is international. The commonalty and reciprocity of all 
the families of Earth is the corrollary of that prayer which 
Europe and America owe to that true Light of Asia Who 
was the Light of the World ! Love, like light, makes no 
apology, but is universally diffusive. In the sight of God 
they are the barbarous nations who treat others as such ! 
A mere localized philanthropy is only a modified misan- 
thropy. No eulogy of Man goes well with the obloquy of 
men or races of men. 

Let it be Literature. It is valid as the reflection of life. 
Life is the dominant — the strong, searching, chord. The 
specializing of language as such is external to the impulses 
which make words subservient to rich feeling, and find those 
the only classics which hold the world's heart. The best is 
that which most invites and best endures translation. To 
get and to appreciate another point of view, — this is the 
benefit. Motif then is more than technique. We study the 
masters of English, if duly, that we may value and per- 
petuate the genius of English manhood. Hebrew, Greek, 
Latin — all tongues, or modern or antique, — they are 
human. Their polyglot finds Sympathy of one speech. 
This is the Pentecostal affluence which reverses Babel ! 
Philology ought to inspire a philanthropy which forgets race 
and date. Toward the whole synthesis of mankind litera- 
ture is the most potent and perennial influence. It is the 
vessel of prophecy. By it the dead speak. No language 
that has voiced a literature can ever be dead except to men 

104 



who are not alive. It is a mirror in which, for those who 
will look, heart answers heart. " To learn language ( wrote 
John P. Coyle ) but not literature is to be barely human, — 
to be a non-historical man. Literature is specifically higher 
than language. It stands for a higher type of a corporate 
life. It is the chief agency thro which the higher historical 
forces are transmitted, with least refraction or deflection, or 
diminution of energy." Hence the Bible. One should 
study Greek to understand the Greeks — German to under- 
stand the Germans — and specialize in any tongue so as to 
sympathize with the men who speak or who spake it. So 
let grammar and glossary do their best : but so that they 
may lead to the Library, and there the Library pour its 
gold into the furnaces of Life ! 

Or let it be Sociology. What is Society, or the still in- 
choate because unethicised science thereof, without sympa- 
thy ? Society itself is a super-specialistic term. Work and 
wages and weal, brain and brawn, craft and craftiness, get 
and give, — our Economics, — must be debrutalized, intensely 
humanized, nay evangelized, if it is not to be a dismal 
swamp of bog and malaria. Subdivisive specialism will not 
shoulder the load. We need first a justified and second an 
applied generalization — Ethics, which is universal equity. 
Over against every wrong a right, by the side of every 
right a duty, sympathetic deed: else antipathy and nations 
slipping in blood ! 

" Does business mean — ' Die you live I !' 
Then ' Trade is trade !' but sings a lie; 
'Tis only War grown miserly." 

Or be it the Church. If it is not to be a dissonance of 
clanging symbols ( and you may write the first sibilant 
either way ) it must recognize that Theology like every 
other science is a specialty, but that Religion is a sym- 
pathy. Its privilege is essentially inclusive and flatters no 
selfish exceptionalist ! Caste is anti-Christ. To care for 
God is to care for men as God understands them. To clas- 

105 



sify and segregate sympathy here is to tear the vesture of 
the Lord — to divide His heart. The real Church is at once 
the infirmary and the arsenal of all souls. Comprehension 
is its passion and its power. It is either a plan and specifi- 
cation of Society as it ought to be and as God means it shall 
be, or it is the most stupendous failure of history — all fail- 
ures in one ! But if the sympathy of God is not impracti- 
cable and the Gospel stultified, then to join the Church is 
to join mankind ! 

So then, by all this illustration, "Love is the fulfilling of 
the law," and in every way Sympathy, which is love's vindi- 
cation, stands as an ideal, a motive and a goal, over against 
the insularities, the antagonisms, the envies, and all the Kil- 
kenny quarrels of partisans and egotists. Not money for 
money's sake, nor art for art's sake, nor science for science's 
sake; but all these for man's sake, and for every man's. 

" Such as the love is, ( said Swedenborg ) such is the wis- 
dom." Out of specialism are the issues of knowledge but 
" out of the heart are the issues of life." Knowledge alone 
inflates — Love upbuilds. If my distinction is clear it in- 
volves its own applications and appeals. 

My illustration is special in so far as it is pedagogic, but I 
seek to use this but as a good instance and in sympathy 
with all things that it subtends, even to the very highest. 
True education is eduction — the outdrawing of the utmost 
capacity. The market value of it is in its production of 
whole men, wide-based and well-builded, such as are more 
and more demanded for the enlarging and compacting part- 
nerships of mankind. " The function of education (writes 
Herbert Spencer) is to prepare for complete living." It 
should teach men to generalize well, and thus, in the appre- 
ciation of large relations and in the inclusion of many 
points of view, best to compass each his own work. 

The truest preparation toward any one calling is wide- 
mindedness, and the alert, the agile, the joyful application 
of diverse and even oblique bearings. The wider the lens 

106 



the more rays it focuses. The narrow tire wears a deep 
rut; but the broad wheel both arrives earlier with a larger 
load and also betters the way for those who follow. 

The great Italians are the first and finest instance of a 
various and superb general ability. Leonardo da Vinci, Fra 
Paoli Sarpi, Michael Angelo, are of a group more than 
ambidextrous, who wrought wonderfully in many fields. 
Their specialty was to live. Moses was such a man, and it 
took an Angelo to interpret his heroic mould. 

An interest aroused and established in the whole round of 
lore and life, a heart responsive to the multiformity of 
knowledge and endeavor, — this is the best preliminary prepa- 
ration for any and every particular pursuit. If a too- early 
parti alism crowds this aside, it steals away that horizon 
beyond his peculiar task which, for the relief of his intellect 
and for the health of his heart, every man needs. When 
professionalism becomes a vice it is because it looks meager- 
ly and torpidly upon all that does not fit its own furrow, is 
only practical at one angle. It lacks amity and comity. It 
is selfish. Its analog is in that piteous and happily rare dis- 
ease of the eye in which vision can only see in one direct line 
and is as if directed thro a gun barrel. Blindness supervenes. 

Solitary and intense concentration requires the offset of a 
well-taught and therefore early-taught outlook, uplook, in- 
look, onlook. Bare routine of head or hand, becoming 
automatic, starves ideality. Only large conviction and a 
sense of relativity can school that content and sweet heart- 
edness which, because of the ultimate meanings beyond all 
present utilities, confers upon each plain and frugal task the 
touch of finality. 

Only sincere sympathy can redeem any specialty from 
monotony and myopia: but this sympathy gives momentum 
to all skill, and in its climate the eyes kindle, because 
" patience worketh experience, and experience hope, and 
hope maketh not ashamed, because love is shed abroad in 
the heart." Here is where comes in the humanistic side of 

107 



education. In his final published article it was thus put by 
one of our noblest graduates, who this year has begun his 
endless 'summer in a garden,' — Charles Dudley Warner 
of '51. 

" The better part of the life of a man is in and by the 
imagination. This is not generally believed, because it is 
not generally believed that the chief end of man is the accu- 
mulation of intellectual and spiritual material. Hence it is 
that what is called a practical education is set above the 
mere enlargement and enrichment of the mind, and the 
possession of the material is valued and the intellectual life 
is undervalued. But it should be remembered that the best 
preparation for a practical and useful life is in the high 
development of the powers of the mind, and that com- 
monly by a culture that is not considered practical. The 
notable fact about the group of great parliamentary ora- 
tors in the days of George III. is the exhibition of their 
intellectual resources in the entire world of letters, the 
classics and ancient and modern history. Yet all of them 
owed their development to a strictly classical training in the 
schools. And most of them had not only the gift of the 
imagination necessary to great eloquence, but also were so 
mentally disciplined by the classics that they handled the 
practical questions upon which they legislated with clear- 
ness and decision. The great masters of finance were the 
classically- trained orators William Pitt and Charles James 
Fox." 

The old term, " a liberal education," and the thing itself, 
it is today a fad to challenge and with much self-sufficient 
ascerbity; but I make bold to urge that " liberal education " 
was never more needed, both to introduce the skill and to 
amend the tenuity of the expert. In spite of all belligerent 
neological dogmas liberality of mind and purpose is indis- 
pensable. Liberality has many windows and many doors, 
and makes room at its hearth for every guest that is clean 
and sane. It is constructive, and so while hospitable it 

108 



does not keep a disorderly house! Its liberty is not license 
nor its largeness laxity. It is broad, but its dimensions 
include depth also. It neither abandons law nor worships 
it. It follows the " more excellent way." 

Such an education puts no premium upon haste, nor does 
it discount future power by an immature substitution of 
learning for training. It is structural toward the whole 
man and seeks to issue him not besmeared but bessemered. 
It considers the capable metal more than the commercial 
false edge. Self-realization is the end. It seeks not yours 
but you ! It teaches you to ponder the wherefore and the 
whither. You are not tools but men. If you would be 
handy in this big world you must be hearty. Just in so far 
as you are men, and no further, will your scholarship prove 
available. For in letters and in life, in art and religion, in 
school and house, in whatever balances the harm and heals 
the hurt, in whatever makes woman tender and man brave, 
whatever enlarges the scholar, the seer, the saint, — Sym- 
pathy interprets and bonds all things, and " passe th all things 
for illumination." It gives quality to quantity. 

Men of the Class of 1901 : 

You are the best class that ever graduated from this Col- 
lege in the twentieth century ! When from the Gymnasium 
gallery that bears your imprimatur forty classes look down 
upon you, may you still be without a better ! I shall not 
be there. You have had " tutors and governors until the 
time appointed." All that is over. You are glad and sorry. 
I have at least one good reason to feel an especial proprie- 
tary right in you. I claim it and you will grant it. You will 
keep faith with the lovely old lady that lives on the hill ! 
You are a part of her brood and breed. She is not rich but 
she is kindly. Such as she has had she has given you. 
Keep it. Put it to the good usury of life. Cherish every 
pure ambition, every manly vow. Revoke every mistake. 
In the name of all your teachers, who have also striven to 

109 



be your friends, — in the name of all the College that is, that 
has been, and that shall be, — by this last word of admoni- 
tion and of hope, — I greet you. B on voyage I May you 
do business in the great waters of Time, and may you not 
come home " in ballast " but deep-laden, upon tides " too 
full for sound or foam," and so with an abundant entrance. 
May God always have with you the last word ! Be perfected 
in that love which casteth out all fear ! 

Prayers for you, — tears for you, — cheers for you, — 
years for you ! Be of good courage. Hurrah ! and Amen ! 



110 



SYMMETRY 

TO THE GRADUATING CLASS, JUNE 22, 1902 

Ephraim is a cake not turned. Hosea 7 : 8. 

With gratitude and hope I note the passing years, and 
for the tenth time stand here to say to you of this latest 
graduating class a word of final exhortation. Bear with it 
and me this once more. With what I try to utter to you I 
search myself. 

Hosea was both a preacher and a type. Strikingly he 
instanced what it was to carry the " burden " of the 
prophet. His task was vicarious, as are the tasks of all men 
who upbear their time. His words are anguished as he 
views the deep apostacy of the ten tribes; intense with 
reproach, with lament, with entreaty, lurid with the reflec- 
tion of astounding wickedness and its impending wo, in a 
day when his land was saturated with lust and blood, and 
when elegant scoffing went hand in hand with vile degen- 
eracy. The passion of his broken rhetoric, the abrupt 
blending of wrathful accusation and pathetic appeal, are of 
the very " accent of the Holy Ghost." 

The prophet snatches illustration from every side, and 
midway in his tempestuous utterance he makes the plainest 
every-day comparison — a kitchen picture — serve his use. 
He likens Israel to the baker's oven — heated, waiting while 
the leaven works, standing hot thro the night, blazing out 
in the morning, devouring all that is near it. It is sharp and 
vigorous. Then he swings the figure, and Ephraim, who has 
been the red-hot oven, is now himself that which the oven 
destroys. 

That primitive appliance, the oriental tan-nur, was a 
cylinder of baked clay. Three feet high it stood, somewhat 
conical. The fire was lit within, the baking placed against, 
or plastered upon, the outside. The utensil was familiar, 

ill 



and its careless use sufficiently so. In every household what 
the prophet pictures had sometime sacrificed the morning 
fare. A hot oven neglected, a " cake not turned ", and a 
ruined baking, — one side done too much, the other not 
done at all, one side scorched and cindered, the other an 
insipid paste. Overdone, underdone, undone, — an unpalat- 
able and indigestible compound of grit and dough, sheer 
worthlessness and waste. The housekeeper must begin 
anew, or if flour and yeast are gone must go hungry. 

There, then, is a parable wrapped small. Such a cake 
Ephraim was, and such, alas, is many a modern man who 
thinks it fine to despise both Hebrew and prophet. It is 
the plainest suggestion of an abundant lesson. It exhibits 
good materials badly manufactured, — too much fire and too 
little cook ! Misapplied fuel, facilities frustrated, good 
stuff spoiled, a charred and emetic result, fit only for cats 
and dogs ! " Because thou art lukewarm and neither cold 
nor hot, I will spew thee out of My mouth ! " 

Life's hot ovens, not enough tended, are ever turning off 
those who are done on one side and on one side only, — half 
baked characters. These men, ( and some of them are 
women,) a composite of exaggeration and neglect, are 
" cakes not turned." For, fine flour, stout yeast, stiff 
kneading, and you haven't good bread unless you add to 
these careful cooking. " These ought ye to have done and 
not to leave the other undone ! " We can all recall enter- 
prises of ours that fell out a dead loss simply because we did 
not watch our ovens ! 

Today's ruined batch is not however all a loss, if patient 
experience works betterment tomorrow. 

The blunders of this world are mainly the result of heed- 
lessness. 

" Evil is wrought by want of thought, 
As well as by want of heart." 

Where malice slays its thousands, carelessness slays its 
myriads. It is therefore more disastrous than malice ! Con- 

112 



tinually men are going to the wall because they do not 
remember that opportunity always has double possibilities, 
evil as well as good. Permission to make a great success is 
permission also to make a great failure. Bad handling can 
wreck the sturdiest ship, mismanagement waste the amplest 
fortune, inadvertence foil the best occasions, delay slam in 
our faces hope's brightest door, — the whole life fail by not 
turning the cake all ways to the fire ! Homely and whole- 
some then the precept, that the result after God's mind is 
a man done on both sides. Thoroness, which is thro-and- 
throness, is as desirable in character as in cookery. And so 
our theme is a warning against that disproportion which 
follows both excess and neglect. All-aroundness, balance, 
symmetry, is the true ideal and goal of an available man. 
He loses this equipoise and sphericity, and becomes gibbous 
and lopsided, who is willing to let defects offset his excel- 
lences. He has the moral mumps ! 

Even distribution is the task of the true life, to utilize the 
maximum of energy and to minimize the waste. With a 
loose joint and poor packing the mechanism has " play " 
and there is friction and lost motion. Misspent force shat- 
ters its tools. If the enginery does not fit the hull there is 
strain and danger. The steam boiler that fizzes at all its 
joints wastes steam — the boiler overtaxed bursts. A good 
equilibrium lavishes nothing and uses all. 

For the differences which determine and distinguish suc- 
cess or failure are no great differences. Not toto coelo, but 
by a little arc, does winning change to losing. Tall men are 
taller by inches, not feet. It is in the final ten per cent, of 
possible force that men surpass their fellows. 

" The little more, and how much it is: 
The little less, and what worlds away ! " 

In wooing or in war, the margin wins. The last few grains 
turn the balance. Three of four degrees of the barometer's 
thirty- two register the calm and the tornado. A " Water- 
bury watch " can run within ten minutes a month, and that 

us 



is all its inferiority to the chronometer that runs within ten 
seconds. Seven per cent, profit and the business succeeds; 
seven per cent, loss and it fails. Fractions decide the life ! 

We all know men with attainments we despair of matched 
with weaknesses we despise, who, beating the air with one 
wing, chafe, struggle, and die distanced. He will get further 
who walks on two feet than he who attempts to run on all 
fours ! The upper and under tensions must both be regulated. 
The window plant must be turned about. For a complete 
beauty the tree must stand in the open. A ship that has 
not enough keel and ballast for her sail is " crank," and so 
is a man who leans too far one way and lacks recovering 
power ! If suddenly this whirling planet were to slow 
down and cease its revolutions, think how its very zones 
would shift ! — the side towards the Sun becoming an intol- 
erable Sahara, the side away a more than Arctic midnight, 
all the tribes of men presently peopling only the narrow 
belt of permanent twilight ! But what the Earth has from 
her impartial exposure to the Sun, that must we get by 
turning our entire being to the illumination of God. 

This is it — that wholeness must fortify all ways. Isolated 
virtues are not virtue. One may have some good traits yet 
not be good. Energy will not redeem selfishness, nor beauty 
and taste condone idleness, nor brilliancy offset scrofulous 
morals. Keen gifts set in such broad defects make carica- 
ture. He who would live more than platitude must know 
that, far from averaging force with fault, high desire urges 
that allegory of Holmes', — 

" The weakest spot must stan' the strain, 
An' the way to fix it, ez I maintain, 
Is only jest to make that place as strong as the rest." 

The textural quality must lie under the surface finish. 
Symmetry is more than bigness. The three-ply man, body, 
brain, and heart, — the man thinking, feeling, acting, must 
have an equalized development. Terrestrial and celestial 
relations must not quarrel. This triune life is citizen of a 

114 



dual world. The so-called practical and the so-called ideal 
life are not at variance. To specialize the muscles of one 
arm only is to deny the right of the other. To specialize 
any one capacity or realm, and not to generalize that part 
with the whole, is to defeat even that one. 

There is no more moving warning against an unnatural 
prematurity and an unnatural immaturity than the auto- 
biography of John Stuart Mill. Scholarly in Greek at eight, 
a close student of history at ten, he wrote: " I never was a 
boy, never played at cricket — it is better to let Nature have 
her own way." It was monstrous: but more monstrous was 
the way in which his father taught him austere doubt, and 
for bread offered him scorpions ! 

What abnormal schooling is that which concerns itself 
only with the objective and ignores the soul that sees, 
thinks, and lives on. Sufficient reason, adequate end and 
action with this reference — these, or starvation. The 
higher education, the real fulfilment of manhood, must be 
" of large discourse, looking before and after." The great- 
est realities are the innermost. That is but arrested devel- 
opment which thinks that man's chief end is to know things, 
rather than to discern personality. To do, to be — the 
realm of person and conscience — this is life. Spiritual navi- 
gation, too, must be by the stars of Heaven; and of them all, 
brighter than Sirius and Alcyone, by the Star of Bethlehem. 

" When science reaches forth her arms to feel from world 
to world," she still must cry with the old Psalm, unless 
her heart is frozen in conceit, — " My soul thirsteth for the 
living God !" One may be broad, yet be shallow. To see 
horizontally, but be blind vertically, is to usurp ethics by 
mere esthetics and statistics — esthetics which fail of the true 
beauty, and statistics which omit the supreme fact. Walter 
Scott's last word to his son Lockhart was: " My dear, be 
a good man ! " Devotion to the highest is the root of wis- 
dom. Upper education begins not with abstruse mathemat- 
ics and abstract speculation and all the array and analysis 

115 



of objects, but with the lore of loving lips that taught us — 

" Now I lay me down to sleep ; 
I pray Thee, Lord, my soul to keep," — 

and sealed it with a mother's kiss ! There can be no equity 
of manhood that refuses life's inner side and ultimate ques- 
tion. The thinking and the doing that does not culminate 
in God is truncated and thwarted. Its restlessness is its 
confession of poverty. It denies the heart hunger which is 
either a prophecy or a doom. Nor is admission of the God- 
side of life enough, without a joyful submission. One may 
have a mind furnished like a great library, and a spirit as 
hard and cold as that library's walls. It is the " cake not 
turned ! " For what a distortion is it to know and not to be ! 
— never to arrive — to be mentally finished and spiritually 
not begun ! Again I turn you to that one complete man- 
hood — His, in Whom we are to " grow up in all things " un- 
til we come to the complete and entire man — to the meas- 
ure of the stature of fulness This only is accomplishment. 
True education is a ripening — a seasoning. It endeavors 
to evoke many-sidedness — to help one's mind to become 
public, large, hospitable. It is the glory of a true college 
course that it does not purport to finish its scholar but to 
start him well. It is not a sausage-machine. Its disciplines 
neither attempt nor desire to rival the school of technology. 
It takes time, and therefore must often hear the sneers of 
haste-making avarice. Remember Moses' college course of 
forty years. To surround the task, to compass and com- 
prehend it, has less haste but more speed. 

" We may o'errun by violent swiftness that which we run at, 
And lose by overrunning." 

Far from circumstances jostling mediocrity to the top, 
they will throw it under. Shake a measure, and see the big 
tubers come up! In this exacting and sifting time the small 
potatoes go out of sight. There is a plenty of demand for 
those who will be all they can be: but little enough for 

116 



seconds. Well- tempered tools will longest hold their edge. 
The steel process takes longer; but then you get steel. "He 
that will have a cake out of the meal must needs tarry the 
grinding." One who would precipitate himself half-baked 
upon an unwary world will ultimately pay the freight. The 
world will get even with him. It will not willingly set its 
teeth twice in a raw man. He isn't cooked! 

You have not taken the " short cut." You are now to 
advance upon the same broad guage, and not for a moment 
to lose the wider view of capacious, generous sympathies. 
You will be available not because you have been here, but 
because you have absorbed this idea of being many-bladed. 
You cannot lie down upon past privileges. A wider view 
demands not less intensity but more. No stencilled A. B. 
will make indeterminateness efficient. One who prides him- 
self merely because he has had advantages, is as foolish as 
one who prides himself because he has not had them ! Worth 
is as the man is. " A man is worth to himself what he is 
capable to enjoy, worth to the world what he is capable to 
impart." This is the whole lesson of Hosea's oven and of 
the " cake not turned." And I make the prayer, — " The 
God of peace himself sancitify you wholly, and may your 
whole body, soul and spirit be preserved entire, without 
blame, at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ." 

Men of the Class of 1902: 

In the name of the College, and of all your instructors 
there, I give you each a hearty hand. You have been a part 
of Hamilton in days of progress. Your influence has been 
true and steadying. You are still to be a part of the College 
and she is still to claim your concern and your fidelity. 
Stand by her true advancement as long as you live. Honor 
her imprimatur. It takes good men to be leaders and to be 
followers. Stand four-square toward life's exactions and 
awards. Be apart from that cross-eyed envy which puts an 
emphasis upon equity that denies liberty, and from the one- 

117 



eyed greed that asserts liberty to the denial of equality. 
Hold fast to that equity which is duty, and stand for it 
steadily, even tho contra mundum. Dr. Weir Mitchell has 
written well that " temperament is permanent mood." So 
set each mood broadly in all its just relations, and let your 
joys be "more than mere animal spirits." Both weed your 
souls and plant them, both plant them and weed them. 

It has been deplored that " There are no great men now." 
It is not true. Real greatness is absolute, not relative. The 
ideal is not a few exceptions, but a high average. Success 
lies not in surpassing your fellow men, but in surpassing 
yourself. So shall you lift the world, which is harder and 
nobler than to surprise it. Recall the last order of Col. 
Liscum of the Ninth Infantry, falling at Tien-Tsin, — "Keep 
on firing ! " Always there is a firing line. Stand there un- 
der the great unseen Captain. That's the place, and <as to 
what men say, no matter, — or not the first matter. 

" They out-talked thee, hissed thee, tore thee; 
Better men fared thus before thee, 
Fired their ringing shot and passed, 
Hotly charged, and sank at last. 

Charge once more then, and be dumb ! 
Let the victors when they come, 
When the forts of folly fall, 
Find thy body by the wall." 

And last I cite you to the two noble examples that you 
have had, in the persons of those honored and sturdy men 
who, while your course on the good hill has been accomplish- 
ing, have finished theirs on Earth, — Dr. Hopkins, Dr. Ter- 
rett. Carry those twin memories as your go and never for- 
get that they were your friends ! Separated but not sun- 
dered, may every manly affection, pure ambition, generous 
labor, that you have shared here, bless you in days to come. 
And in that life of prayer which is a pledge and a prophecy, 
may your friendships still be a unit — 

" Bound with gold chains about the feet of God." 
118 



PROBLEMS OF CHURCH AND COLLEGE 

TO THE GRADUATING CLASS, JUNE 21, 1903 
Hold fast that which thou hast, that no man take thy crown. Revelation 8:11. 

The source of this admonition, and the stimulations of its 
great inducement, furnish room and breath within which 
our present thought can move freely. Gladly I reckon that, 
whatever our several orbits, we have, who are here, a com- 
mon solar centre, and that American patriotism, mental 
ardor, and that faith whose counterproof is unflinching fidel- 
ity, include us all in their high compulsions. 

I must be satisfied to condense and to suggest, italicising 
some chief matters which urge a new fortitude toward the 
exacting privilege of a time whose every pulsation is so stim- 
ulated. I must be positive, yet assuming no infallibility. 
For that, there are too many counter-popes here, yet hold- 
ing all of them, I trust, a pontifical theory of indulgence, 
and willing to shrive my errors. If you love the tides of 
truth, you are assured that it is not for the closet alone but 
for "free and open encounter," not merely for the armory, 
but for the tented field and the battle's perilous edge. 

I speak as to some of the primary present problems of the 
College and the Church. The Church is " the blessed com- 
pany of all faithful people." Not in our differences, which 
all are secondary and provisional, but in the things in which 
we agree, are we of the one Shepherd and the one flock. An 
ebbing faith obtrudes the non-essentials; — flood- tide, where 
the ships go free, buries these. It is not that this polity or 
that argument may prevail; but that the masterful love of 
the world's Messiah may subdue, inform, confirm, and so 
bring in the only and immortal kingdom. 

All stages of growth are new occasions of fidelity or of 
default. They " teach new duties " and " make uncouth " 
the comprehensions and measures which they displace. Our 

119 



dislodgements test us whether we have rested upon unshak- 
able reality or upon transient form. Winds and floods 
emphasize the rock. Fire searches the " wood, hay and 
stubble " of traditional interpretations. Loyalty stands 
sure, and, tho with modern ordnance and smokeless powder, 
it is still a convinced and expectant manhood that wins the 

fight. 

Exigency always stimulates the brave. In a rapid and 
anxious time the timid flutter and cower, the tumid bluster 
— to no better purpose; but they who "know Whom they 
have believed " front the new conditions with new courage. 

New conditions there are. Each day the world compacts 
and the inter-relation of mankind is more intense. Provi- 
dence is now forcing our tardiness to realize the Orient, and 
also sternly facing us toward complex and culminating 
domestic questions. 

Immigration by the annual half-million and more; Africa 
within our doors, with the involved evasions of the Constitu- 
tion in which the old barbarities reappear; the tireless mach- 
inations within the wooden-horse of Mormonism; stolid 
illiteracy; the organized tyrannies of greed and envy — 
playing with fire; the overriding of equity both by capital 
and craftsmanship; the evasion, the barter, the trampling 
of law; the congestion of the city; the depraving of local 
government; the rape of the ballot; the place-seeking of 
scoundrels; the contempt of that only code which offers 
tired man fifty-two holidays in the year, and there gives his 
soul and God the right of way; the fungoid development of 
oligarchy and pseudo-aristocracy; the sins of " pride, idle- 
ness and fulness of bread," which sap the household and rob 
the cradle ; amid all, the epidemic of graft ; — these are some 
of the problems which throw deep shadows upon the moral 
map of our country and our time. Over all these a sordid 
materialism, whose final logic installs sense and sensuality 
above spirit and conscience, and which curses this world by 
ignoring another, broods portentous, and invokes the judg- 

120 



ments of Him Whom it does " not like to retain in its 
knowledge." 

And the problem of a Church, not supine, is whether it 
can hold its own ! No ! If it hesitates and halts, otiose 
and senile. Yes ! If it sees and dares rise up, vibrant, to — 

"Live pure, speak true, right wrong, — 
Follow the King ! " 

The dilemma is Zeitgeist or Heiliger Geist — the age-spirit 
or the Lord's ! For soft seduction is worse than fierce 
attack. Piety and patriotism alike urge a reminting of the 
worn and debased coin-current of alleged Christianity, 
invoke the purging of nominalism with fire and fan, demand 
the bugle-call, " Who is on the Lord's side ? " exact Eli- 
jah's alternative, " Follow Jehovah, or Baal ! " Not so 
much do we need revision of creed, even with its trenchency 
of simplification, as we need renewal of credit, of consent to 
the standards of obedience. " Two masters " are one too 
many! The attempt fails. Yes; "The time is come for 
judgment to begin at the house of God." What the appar- 
ent Church of today unconsciously invokes is an era of 
persecution — the apologia of martyrdom ! For merely to 
" hold one's own "is no martial ambition. Napoleon's 
strategy taught well that "The army which stays in its 
entrenchments is beaten." The defensive postpones defeat; 
but only the offensive wins. So Sedan and Metz, so Tren- 
ton and Yorktown, so Lookout and the Wilderness. The 
enemy marches around our fixed artillery. He circumvents 
us and takes us in flank. The wisdom of our war needs 
the tactics of aggression. We must force the fighting. 

Unable then to drift up stream, two things are demanded. 
First, to see and say that the purpose and power of the Christ 
covers all possible human relations, that His " mind " in- 
cludes all these issues and is alone their solvent. His idea 
of the " Church " is not an ark, but a life-boat ! It is a 
life-saving service, or it is none. All lives, and all of each ! 
The universality of the Gospel is its singularity. It means 

121 



everything if it means anything. To exploit it selfishly 
is to deny it utterly. It is not abstract. The appli- 
cation of the non-partisan ethics of Christ to all that 
affects the society of men is His exaction of our day. Under 
her critical opportunity and probation, He yet forbears with 
this headstrong America. If He is not practicable by us, 
then either He is impossible or we are, and then one must 
give up the other ! If we are to retain Him, the Church, 
not fatuous, must with a prophet's voice declare that the 
" law of Christ " makes illegitimate much that affects to be 
legal, that our economics, our politics, our sociology, must 
not only be ethicised but evangelized ! It must repent of 
its isolations, its temporizing, its idolatries, and no longer 
deaf and dumb and blindly cloistered, deserve and regain 
the respect even while it dares the hate of the world ! 
Ephatha! 

Salvation is not in the passive voice. The " offense of the 
cross " is not ceased. He who will not make it a bauble, 
and will bear it to the place where Christ bore it, shall find 
unexplored meanings in the Gospel ! Well indeed may the 
frightened sailors of time cry to all fugitive and snoring 
prophets, — " Awake, O sleepers, and call upon your God, 
that we perish not ! " 

The other thing is to go — out, if on. Outreach alone is 
apostolical. Narrow individualism defeats itself in wasting 
its virtues upon egotism. The Church must claim, and be 
worthy to claim, far more. It must vindicate its appeal to be 
the highest fulfilment of human longing for federation in God. 

Clinkers in your house furnace are not fuel. They receive 
fire but add nothing to it. They hinder, and they must be 
cleansed out and a new fire built that will give heat. And 
the Church is today such a furnace, clogged with red-hot 
slate and burned- out slag. It must be dumped and re- 
lighted ! Better Gideon's few than the bigger company of 
those who won't fight, who take the oath and their rations 
and take nothing else ! What is an army good for that is 

122 



busy only to burnish its buttons, to improve its barracks, 
and to sing ( at a stand-still ) " Onward, Christian Soldiers ! " 
— never resisting unto blood ! 

In many of our villages four or five feeble and sickly con- 
gregations compete impotently, dividing the body of Christ 
with their unimportant specialties and shivering over their 
'isms' — a handful of coal in each separate stove! Much 
good home missionary money is wasted in maintaining this 
unfruitful rivalry. In our cities the elite saints affect the 
avenues, while the storm-centres of population are not really 
attempted. In emphasizing incidentals, and in succumbing 
to commercial and so-called social standards which Christ 
spurned, the Church but loads the avalanche ! 

Organized originally for direct human help, it crushes its 
ministers with proxies, and substitutes services for service in 
the cottage and the alley. It handles a crucifix rather than 
practicing the cross, and is much sophisticated by the spec- 
tacular fallacy of place and day and the opus operation of 
dignified make-believe. Always this moderatism resists the 
Holy Ghost, the more touchy as it is the more self-satisfied. 
And all the while whole areas of those for whom the Lord 
bled are thinking, — " No man cares for my soul ! " In 
the vestibules of many a theoretical sanctuary the Great 
Mechanic waits wearily and shares with lonely hearts their 
cup of pain. " I was a stranger and ye took Me not in ! " 

Nor is this irony. I know there are true hearts, open 
hands, swift feet: but oh, they are too few ! The Church 
that willed and that went, that called nothing its own, that 
knew the " fellowship of suffering," that was fed to the lions, 
was the Church that once " shook all the mighty world." 
" Stir up Thy strength, O God, and come ^and save us " — 
from ourselves ! Upon the verge of religious bankruptcy, 
the boundless help of the actual Christ calls us to a deeper 
vital movement of conscience than ever yet stirred our land. 

To retranslate Him in a modern Pentecost, to reincarnate 
His love right where men are striving and grieving, to wit- 

123 



ness brotherhood, to wear the red cross, this is the only 
mission, and obedience under it the only problem, of the 
Church. For this alone it was founded and exists. Solve 
this, not by discussion but by direct action, and all is solved. 
The out-of-door Christ, the people's Redeemer, would open 
to such a Church the windows of Heaven and break to it 
the bread of angels ! The Church that suffers is the Church 
that reigns. 

Go forth to the unbidden. By your humanity prove 
again His divinity and mastery, and society would upheave 
in response. Yes, the comfortable and complacent who now 
forsake us because they do not believe that we believe what 
we say, who see no moral difference between us and them, 
would crowd our doors, aware at last of their poverty and 
their calling, and seeking the way of the simple and abun- 
dant life ! Such a movement cannot work from the top 
down, nor from the outside in. In so far as the Church 
makes religion but a phylactery and evades the intense prac- 
ticality of Christ, the world laughs. That the laughter is 
hysterical but makes it the more piteous. A crisis ! Christ 
will have all or nothing. Yes, or No ! Of a truth it is a 
day to rebuild the altar, and with a mighty cry to God, to 
lay ourselves thereon. 

The problem of the College, as it concerns that of the 
Church, is what remains. Nor is the modulation abrupt. 
The Church must make its reasonable appeal to and by 
prepared men. Not merely for its ministry, but for what 
Pope Leo has well called the " apostolate of the laity, " 
education is an essential demand of its strength. Histori- 
cally there is a profound interdependence between the 
American College and the American Church. John Har- 
vard and the founders of Yale, Tennant and Wheelock and 
Kirkland and Wayland and Finney and Hopkins — these 
were men whose idea was elementally Christian. They 
loved the Lord God " with all their mind. " The moral 

124 



and vital relation of College and Church I hold to be larger 
and fuller than direct ecclesiastical control ; but by indirect 
I do not mean remote, I mean informal. Reciprocity and 
affinity are ample, and they are indispensable. The College 
idea and ideal has been thoroly Christian, and so may it 
ever be. Were the College to deny the Great Teacher 
it would be to bite the Hand that has fed it and led it. 
Under the generosity of the Evangel the College purports 
the general distribution, not as opposed to, but as distin- 
guished from, the local condensation of higher education. 
Between the scope and methods of the University and the 
College there should be no hostility, but there should be 
a precise discrimination. Each is needful and distinct. 
Neither should envy nor vaunt. 

Advanced investigation is necessary, and excellent are the 
foundations that foster this. Toward this the adapted Col- 
lege graduate may well be prompted. But there should be 
no composition nor confusion of the two disciplines. By 
whatever indirection, to seek to foreshorten the more 
generic work of the College proper, to despise that anneal- 
ing of personality in which the time element is so import- 
ant, to urge immaturity upon technical research, is short- 
sighted and raw, and it panders to a haste which depreciates 
the quality of both schools. To truncate the College 
course, to sacrifice process to speed, that half-ripe persons 
may be rushed upon the market, to base the doctorate upon 
the tasks which belong to the bachelorate, or to elide these, 
is to shear away strength. The bland device ravels. It 
plays Procrustes. 

For one College, just a College and distinctively such, I 
speak — one that, however others may denude and disinte- 
grate themselves, will (I trust and believe) remain faithful to 
the idea of those solid beginnings from which all later 
edifices of special skill shall better build. Radically conser- 
vative of this, if it shall be singular, singular it will cheer- 
fully be, undiverted from making mental character the foot- 

125 



ing-course of mastership. It will not scramble to follow the 
bellwethers of novelty into the bog of miscellaneousness! 

For mental training, decried only by sciolists, is primary. 
Language, logic, literature, life — are its quadrivium. The 
broad horizon of these nurtures the true synthetic spirit 
which grasps final meanings — which compresses the tire 
upon the wheel. To study what man is, which is psychol- 
ogy; what proof is, which is mathematics and logic; what 
man has done, which is history and law; his instruments, 
which are the languages; what he has said best, which is 
literature; his environments, which are the materials of the 
five laboratories; what he is for, which is patriotism, ethics, 
religion, — all these sciences unite in that humanistic and 
liberal education for which it has stood, and for which this 
College, at least, will stand. 

This definite concentration, not upon abstract subjects 
but upon the subjective man, realizes him, and compacts his 
personality at every step. 

Seeking inspiration as well as instruction, it is concerned 
with the influential quality of its teachers as well as with 
the quantities of their knowledge — the impartation of broad 
comprehension and commanding motive; for true education 
is the influence of life upon life. The genuine College is 
bent to discover, to awaken, to excite noble emulation; to 
make for sanity of mind and body; to teach the soul to 
swim ; to rub men close, as life will rub them ; to promote an 
accuracy and promptitude that is not pedantry, and a vision 
that is not dreaming; to develop intellectual poise and reach, 
along with cogency of expression and oral leadership; not 
to lose the unit in the mass, to stimulate a common moral 
sentiment, which shall shame the dullard, the superficial, the 
unsocial, and repudiate the snobbish, the profligate and the 
false. And the College which does this can never be small 
to the eyes that look for quality rather than noisy bulk. 

All this lifts youth toward manhood, in its most plastic 
and formative years. Unto this an eager College gathers 

126 



local material that else would largely go ungathered, aids it 
to seek and to find itself, and impregnates it with an ardor 
at once human and public. 

Unconditionally and boldly be it said, that the historical 
and natural scope of the College recognizes that this is God's 
Earth, that the furniture of the world is not all of it, and 
that man is God's, to guide and to complete. Nothing at 
last is merely secular. Every fact and act is moral and may 
be holy. The song and romance of College days is to be 
sanctified by that which, while it impels toward nobility and 
quenches passion, leads up to the motives of a service which 
is a worship, and which constrains and satisfies the inmost 
heart. Buckle ( and he has had a sinister school of imita- 
tors ) heaped many heterogeneous and partial instances 
about the two propositions; first, that nations are the 
creatures of circumstances, and next, that the only progress 
is the intellectual. Let Athens, Alexandria, Constantinople, 
answer him, in their age-long crouching under the dirty foot 
of the Turk ! No ! Character makes men and nations, 
and its salvations are more than knowledge. Character is 
reason schooled to think hard and straight into the ultimate 
constructive standards of duty, and obediently to choose 
them with all their enduring implications. 

The truths of religion are to be taught, and the potency 
of those scriptures which focus upon the one complete Man. 
Then let the College speak of right, and keep wide open that 
Book without which, well-pondered, none can be thoro in the 
world's history and significance, or be rooted and grounded 
in the real life. Out of its intensative scrutiny shall come 
a larger interpretation of the stages by which, on from Ur 
to Egypt, all leads up to the central and enduring Christ. 

Our challenge is that here lies the secret of Time — its 
sore travail and its shining goal. Only the human is the 
good; but only the divine is the human. All other theory 
is neither beautiful nor rational. The age that forgets this 
is a self- confused and wandering age. The age that denies 

127 



it is intellectually bastard and blighted. Not in the terms 
of ecclesiasticism, but in those of undefiled relation to the 
spotless and ever-outgoing Vitalizer of Time, not as the 
scribes but as the disciples, let our educations be drenched, 
saturated, fulfilled, exalted, with essential, practical Chris- 
tianity ! To the College which maintains that " the fear of 
the Lord is the beginning of wisdom," the Church, the peo- 
ple, must look for the cadets of truth and devotedness. 
The one problem of the College is to hold fast her integrity 
to the supreme Teacher of Men. But this also is the one 
problem of the Church. Both problems are at last one. 

Men of the Class of 1903: 

The history, the horizon, the hopes of this Hamilton of 
ours are dear to us together. You have grown here in that 
loyalty to fine and firm things which is not a mere impres- 
sionist mood, but which is of the will and the heart. Never 
fear but that this loyalty will always find the work it is fit 
for. You have been taught that curiosity and tenacity are 
completed in reverence. You have been taught to honor 
Him Who is the true Author and Finisher of knowledge. 
Stupidity is ungodly and ungodliness is stupid. If the fear- 
less and magnanimous love of truth as the guide of duty is 
to live in you, your ideals must be spiritual not mechanical. 
Fight your battles hard and fight them in the fear of God. 
Remember that " a just man falls seven times, and riseth 
again." A right heart never can say Die. To your College 
that is, and that is to be, I pledge your hearts. The ark is 
coming home, and as the men of Beth-Shemesh, reaping in 
the valley, lifted up their eyes and rejoiced, so all of us say 
Praise and Amen ! By your manhood and its influence you 
are to honor this old Hill of ours. Always may the voice 
live in your souls that has been our word today, — " Hold 
fast that ye have, that no man take your crown ! " Con- 
quest now, and in God's time the coronation. Athletes of a 
mightier field-day, — Hail to you all ! 

128 



THE GLORIFICATION OF SERVICE 

TO THE GRADUATING CLASS, JUNE 26, 1904 
7 magnify my office. Romans 11 : 13. 

The Revision reads, — " I glorify my ministry." The 
word is really the word " diaconate," or " deaconship." 
" Deacon," in Greek, is the title of a voluntary servant, 
as distinguished from doulos — a bondservant. One offers, 
the other is compelled. A deacon is a willing servant. 

Transferring the very word, we should reread some famil 
iar phrases after this sort ; — 

" He that is greatest among you let him be your deacon." 

" I am among you as the deacon." 

" Made us able deacons of the New Testament." 

"Fill full thy diaconate." 

" Satan's deacons fashion themselves as deacons of right- 
eousness." 

" Deaconing of the strength which God supplieth." 

The service makes the office. Too much we think of 
office as place and position; Paul stated it as work. We 
describe it as a tenure, he declared it as a task; not some- 
thing to inhabit but something to do; not a thing snug, easy, 
well-paid, but an exacting opportunity. Officialism puts 
the officer forward, magnifies itself: service puts forward the 
offices, the duties, for which alone the office exists. In the 
parable of Christ, " Occupy till I come " does not refer to 
tenancy but to activity. Be busy with the charge, keep 
the capital moving, use it. 

So then here is the generic principle of fidelity, which ever 
is concerned not to exhibit a title but to fulfil a trust. 

When Paul thus stated his purpose and interpreted his 
commission, he spoke sincerely. He was not bragging. 
Services were his credentials as a man " sent forth." His 
errand is his end, all that he is or has is but a means toward 

129 



that. So he claims nothing for himself, everything for his 
message. Dress parade, canonical fuss, formal precedency 
— he scouts them. Weapons not epaulettes, fulcrum not 
pedestal. His terrible zeal makes any ecclesiastical martinet 
preposterous. Pomposity and punctiliousness are the refuge 
of small men, who when their station is too large for them 
stiffen their littleness with starch and mannerisms. 

Paul's harness could dispense with trappings, seeing that 
it was for draught, not show. Garbed as the ordinary man, 
not tricked out in special attire and vestment, quick-handed, 
ready to rough it, familiar with long hours and short 
rations, intimate with danger and deprivation, inured to the 
rod and the mob, without salary or vacation and supporting 
himself with his tent-needle, in prison and in pain uttering 
one devoted testimony, alert, daring, incorrigible, thrust 
aloft like a rocket by his own fiery heart — here once for all 
was a man ! Calling himself the least worthy, from Damas- 
cus to Spain, on two continents and in three languages, he 
gave the word "Apostle" its undying glory. 

"If your sword (said the Spartan mother) is too short, 
step closer to your enemy," and oh how swiftly this eager 
soul hastened to close quarters, how rapidly with every man 
he made Christ the theme and the issue ! How surely he 
did his errand. What havoc would that stout blade make 
now of our trivial and tinsel distinctions, social and philo- 
sophical. With what compulsions of nobility this leader of 
leaders packed with results the one life God gave him to 
live ! Service was his business; not warbling himself to 
death upon a pink cloud, but handling the troubles and dan- 
gers of every soul he could get at, meeting the epidemic of 
the world, penurious of not one resource so as to get the 
thing done ! 

Thus he was an example that every man is to be a dea- 
con, called to ministry, ordained to labor, that God's will 
may be done on Earth. Capacity to serve, diligence to 
serve, this is the only earldom. Labor is life. A true 
180 



Church, a true society, is a peerage of servants. Office is 
to be an active, not a passive, noun. A deacon is a doer. 
To consent to be described by " cloth " is to submit to a 
bitter epithet. Intense usefulness is the only honorary de- 
gree; all else may but veil nakedness under ornamental rags. 
Only servants are saints. Deacons all ! 

Now the glorification of service lies in not seeking great 
things for self. That is an undersized ambition. Like the 
owl it has more feathers than flesh, and its beak is better 
than its vision. Like the peacock, its plumage is a poor 
apology for its voice. It is the little bird that does the sing- 
ing, — the lark, the thrush. Officiousness is not effective- 
ness. Love is what thrills and inspires, and " love seeketh 
not its own." If the place is greater than the man, he will 
rattle in it. He advertises the misfit. For bulk, men may 
stand as much alike as barrels, but the empty ones sound 
loudest. Better be a full keg than an empty hogshead ! 
The full ships ride deep. " The shallow murmur." 

It is true that every place shrinks or stretches to fit its 
occupant. A man of moral size has a displacement that 
crowds back the world. A compressed purpose has a " spe- 
cific gravity " all its own. Every person has an opportunity 
to read himself into his calling, to create his part. Sothern 
took a subordinate personation and made Lord Dundreary 
the main thing. It is the will to push the work that digni- 
fies and adorns any station. There are two or three best 
razors in every dozen, tho stamped by the same maker. 
The difference is not in material, but temper. In a man, 
temper is choice — the will. 

Many a young man (it is an undergraduate notion) thinks 
there is no room for him, that all the good places are pre- 
empted. It is not true, except to the flabby. The world, 
like Diogenes, is always looking for the man. The right 
men are always scarce. For those who glorify service there 
is a demand far beyond the supply. How scarce, for in- 
stance, is the strong candidate in politics ! Unavailabilities 

131 



there are in plenty. The machinery of affairs waits for the 
power. Will is electricity — it moves all wheels. The 
handle awaits the hand. The purpose to do the thing un- 
derlies ultimate mastery, and this is the wisdom that is will- 
ing to postpone its rights rather than its duties, and to keep 
its bills even if it loses its receipts. One maximizes service 
by minimizing self, finds life by losing it, the paradox of all 
loftiest manhood. One can have the praises he seeks — 
men's or God's : but the lower recompense may be the price 
of the higher, and the approval that ripens last is worth the 
waiting. It is a vice of our impatient time that so many 
wish to begin at the top and not at the bottom. They seek 
to get rather than to give. The unrest in artisanship is but 
one symptom and instance. Men are trying to evade ap- 
prenticeship, the steady, disciplining details of preparation. 
But it was by declining Saul's armor that David showed 
himself one who would at last come to be able to wield 
Goliath's sword. 

It is not the carved scroll that is the secret of the old 
Stradivarius : but the delicate and sure adjustment of the 
simple inner posts and props. And his cunning who makes 
the violin alive, is the perfect work of patience and pains. 
To offer what will merely pass confesses mediocrity. The 
best men are those who exact of themselves the best work, 
not that which will barely " do ". Results reward that ser- 
vice which counts nothing unimportant, and which reckons 
every day as good as any that ever was or will be. To bor- 
row from our betters, to follow the greatest, we must per- 
ceive that what they most valued was serviceability, not 
show. And this purpose held fast 

" Shall find the toppling crags of duty, scaled, 
Are close upon the shining table-lands 
To which our God Himself is Moon and Sun." 

A man in Western New York realized the demand for a 
first-class hammer. He studied the tool, and with no 
patent, by sheer excellence conquered the market. " How 

132 



long ( one asked him ) have you been making hammers ? " 
" Twenty-eight years." " Well, by this time you must 
know how to make a pretty good one." He answered, " I 
never made a pretty good hammer, I make the best ham- 
mers in the United States." 

" I remember ( said a wealthy snob to a young lawyer 
who was steadily climbing ) when you used to black my 
father's boots." " Didn't I do it well ? " was the reply. 

Yes, the servant is the master. The lowlier the fidelity, 
the loftier the life. There is no bargain-counter, no ten- 
cent store, where character can be cheapened. Not by 
memorizing aphorisms about success, but by cheerfully 
serving God, day in and week out, do we touch the apos- 
tolic life. The nearest thing done in the truest way is that 
which angels, and even devils too, respect, and what God 
will own. This concentration is what finds its aim, while 
mere sporadic mood scatters like an old bell- mouthed gun, 
more honored in the breech than in the muzzle. 

As a race-horse responds to a skilful driver, and as a 
thorobred dog loves to point for a hunter who kills with 
either barrel, so men are glad to give " the tools to the man 
who can use them." 

It is a story forty years old — how when the flank was 
turned at Cedar Creek and all was panic and disaster, there 
came down the turnpike like a cloud's shadow, rowelling, 
riding, flying, a resistless will ! " The other way, boys ! 
Face the other way ! We're going back." The rout was a 
rally, the rabble a charging front, — " Sheridan ! Sheridan !" 
— and Jubal Early went the way he came. Such a leader 
one man can be. Almighty God wants such to stem the 
flood, to reform the broken lines, to face the discouraged 
" the other way," by the impact of a determination about 
whose strength ten thousand men gather to the renewed 

fight. 

When the Wesleys confronted the Deism of the eighteenth 
century with the Gospel, it shook and died, and the leaden 

133 



age breathed life again. Never was there a really great 
movement or achievement on this Earth into which some 
one had not put his total capital. 

Men of the Class of 1904 : 

I speak to you as to those of whom I am persuaded 
things that accompany a manhood at once devoted and 
reverent. 

The moral obligations of college men to make their train- 
ing efficient in " the stream of life " cannot compel you too 
sternly, nor invite you too ardently. It is a gallant thing to 
live hard and strong. A man whose ambition is dedicated 
to his God will shirk no demand, nor reckon less than noble 
any of the penalties of high leadership. " Go in anywhere, 
( said a general to one of his colonels ) — you'll find lovely 
fighting along the whole line " ! By and by we will hang 
your swords somewhere on the walls of our templed Hill up 
there. We grudge you no sacrifice, we spare you not one 
pain, we give you now to God, to time, to your country, to 
men, and only pray that you may pay the full price of 
immortality without misgiving or any backward look. 

Let the thought that rules these verses of our own Clinton 
Scollard sing for us all ; — 

" Tears for the weaklings ! but for those who fought 
And perished nobly, upon land or wave, 
No lamentation, no dark draperies brought, 
No sad songs for the brave ! 

" But rather jubilation — peal on peal 

Of joy-bells, — Hope's white lilies 'neath the Sun, — 
Because they died with sacrificial zeal, 
Their patriot duty done ! " 

You go forth from a College radically conservative to 
educate men, " practical " to develop spirit, to stimulate the 
whole mind and manhood, striving not to issue a product 
smitten with the intellectual mumps of the partialist, or 
addicted to the exploitation of vagaries. Respect the hall- 
134 



mark by never resting upon it. It is a permission and a 
commission to rouse and spur you. Let your memories be 
a tonic, not a sedative. Law, politics, science, art, letters, 
the chair of the teacher or editor, that pulpit which Spur- 
geon called " the Thermopylae of Christendom," — all these 
are opportunity for you to make a brilliant and benign 
record or a ghastly failure. God calls every man of you 
into the ministry — to serving. " Take heed ( O Archippus ) 
to the ministry which thou hast received in the Lord, that 
thou fulfil it." Glorify your diaconates with a vow and a 
vigor that shall never know the futilities and the fatigues of 
self-idolatry ! Follow that flag whose field, white as the 
light is, bears a crimson cross ! Pledge yourselves to the 
utmost that God and men can get out of you. Crowd your 
place, whatever it may be, with personality. Empty your- 
self into your task as the founder pours the molten metal 
into every crevice of the mold. Seek always an issue with 
right in it and fight the Devil with fire. Make every wrong 
your quarrel. Say your word boldly, do your deed bravely, 
then, " Good and faithful servants,— ENTER " ! 



135 



DEMOCRACY AND CHRISTIANITY 

TO THE GRADUATING CLASS, JUNE 25, 1905 

As free, and not using your freedom for a cloke of wickedness. 1 Peter 2: 16. 

Real freedom, rightly used. 

Before Rome was, or Greece, Moses outlined and at- 
tempted a system of government by and for the people. It 
laid great stress upon the personal partnership of each man, 
It was, on its human side, elementally republican. The 
initiative lay with the responsible units. Their coordina- 
tion was to be affirmed thro chosen and answerable repre- 
sentatives. It based upon the two unchanging human re- 
quirements — individuality and federation. Thus Israel was 
to be the " prevailer ". But the idea has prevailed, and will, 
tho Israel lapsed from it. Moses survives. He was the 
prophet of a social inspiration which slowly dawns upon the 
modern world. It is not even yet ripe: but it is ripening. 
The Old Testament is not antiquated; it is the people's 
book, the primer of freedom. To that tribunal the fiery 
Hebrew prophets, who thundered the divine demand for 
righteous law, for liberty, for equal rights, cited their genera- 
tions and subpoenaed monarch and priest. 

For Israel had swerved from its popular prerogative and 
taken up with a borrowed subserviency. When they de- 
manded a king their political decay had begun. Samuel an- 
nointed Saul under a solemn protest that royalty would be 
the disappointment it proved. The acclaim was a confessio 
paupertatis. Bulk them, and Israel's kings were, and all 
kings have been, a sorry lot. History also " poureth con- 
tempt upon princes." Their alleged " divine right " has 
been a grotesque. 

Seekinglthe deepest estimate of man and his associate 
life, distinguishing makeshift means from primary ends, 
essential humanity from its temporary furniture and uten- 
136 



sils, let us measure those two mighty and mutual words which 
spell the whole hope of mankind — Democracy, Christianity. 

I shall today draw heavily upon your patience, but even 
so the time-limit permits only the broadaxe and adze. I can 
only hew it rough and rapidly. Anyone is welcome to the 
chips: but if you cannot refute you must not refuse. 

Mankind is man kinned — brothered. Paul's phrase, 
" the whole Fatherdom," affirms an integral race, of one 
origin, anatomy, concern, probation — " one far-off divine 
event." " One spirit, one body " is the full precept of that 
New Testament which daringly contemplates and deter- 
minedly intends the rearrangement of the world. Under 
and unto God the Gospel instinctively, unswervingly, pur- 
poses this infrangible unity of man. It is the one alterna- 
tive opposing all present sedition and secession. Either 
solidarity, cohesion, making way steadily, by steps however 
slow, over the stupidities of selfishness; or at last a sterile 
race and a shattered star ! It opposes congregation to 
segregation. Its specialty is not parts : but the whole. Its 
goal is mankind. 

And the world process is toward the full realization of 
human homogeneity. Time is pedagogic of this. History is 
the record of this schooling. The evolution is racial, and 
forces us to study geography and ethnology anew — to think 
internationally. Artificial demarcations are proving imprac- 
ticable. The static gives way to the dynamic. Economics 
has to be concerned with the whole Earth's housekeeping, 
and politics and diplomacy are finding themselves defeated 
by mere provincialism. Philanthropy, in its deepest sense, 
whether as equity or as religion, is revealing as the bond 
that transcends date and region. Yes, it is " an increasing 
purpose." Sociology is ethics. Society is man capitalized, 
and " the life of each individual represents a social value." 

Whatever else was provoked out of him, Thomas Paine, 
when he wrote the " Rights of Man," was an irrefutable 
prophet. Fundamentally that document is true. Its 

137 



audacity angered all Tories: but in spite of reactionaries and 
the recrudescence of the worship of mere force, the Tory is 
obsolescent. The air of freedom was in Paine's book, and 
time has justified it. The bold experiment of 1789 in Amer- 
ica has legitimated man and refuted the doctrine of his 
perpetual nonage. 

Constructed for and environed by his fellows, man finds 
association inevitable. Ways and means are but by-laws, 
tentative, provisional, to be amended, to be abandoned; 
association remains. And the definition and practical order- 
ing of man's relation and commonweal, by whatever devices, 
wiser or worse — this is government. 

However they have stuttered or fumbled, all its experi- 
ments have somehow sought for fair and fruitful terms under 
which men might live together. Tho the deed has often 
denied the tradition, well-being has been the end claimed — 
the general good. 

That government must be the best which seeks and pro- 
motes the utmost welfare of all its people, holding equity as 
its supreme law. As a means to any other end it is stulti- 
fied and condemned. The seat of authority in the State 
rests on right: but right is equity and never aught else, and 
equity is service. For human service, and for this only, 
government is a trustee. 

Noting some of the main forms with which men have ex- 
perimented, or been experimented, name first that of which 
tribalism was a rudiment ( exploited at last by its strongest 
man ), Autocracy. It is the rule of one, centering all in him- 
self, — L'etat c'est moi 9 — absolutism. Sometimes it is me- 
diately bureaucratic, as Turkey and Russia are; but at last 
it wields the despotism which is misanthropy, the throne for 
its own sake, the individuality of the many suppressed, what 
is lavished upon the man depriving the people. Man, if he 
thinks ( and shall he not think ! ) ferments and rages under 
this frustration. Therefore is Russia today like a burning 
mine — like a fuse whose fire eats steadily to the blast ! 

138 



" One red star ! " Apologists for the regime tell us that the 
non-ruling classes of Russia are " unfit to rule." But are the 
ruling classes fit ? Is any fit who is willing or prefers that 
any should remain unfit ? When the sleeper wakes, when 
the unfit come to their own, wo to those who have unfitted 
them ! When the ice of this great Neva loosens, when the 
real Russia finds itself, then alas for those who have built in 
denial of the summer ! Who is there, save the attorneys of 
oppression, to bewail the dawn ? 

" If freedom be not a word that dies when spoken, 
If justice be not a dream whence men must wake, 
How shall not the bonds of the thralldom of old be broken, 
And right put might in the hands of them that break ?" 

Next, Monarchy — a term of varied limits, and compris- 
ing little or much responsibility. Sometimes all the real 
control is with those who fondly retain the terminology of 
subjection as an ornamental anachronism, and are willing to 
pay the bills ! But think what things have come to pass 
between the frank brutality of Henry the Eighth and the 
obedient suavity of Edward the Seventh ! The people have 
learned that it is their England. The Tudors and the 
Stuarts are gone. Great Britain ( as Andrew D. White has 
recently remarked ) "is simply a republic with a monarchi- 
cal head lingering along on good behavior." 

Plutocracy — the rule of wealth — the power of money- 
holders as such. It is not formally proclaimed, but it is 
strong and subtle to subvert men. Its silent arithmetic 
does not indeed necessitate, but makes possible, oppressions 
not less actual because insidious. Its " community of inter- 
est," widely diverse from the interests of the community, 
has ere now ruined great states. It instinctively resents the 
mandate and mandamus of the people. Mammon, with 
cowardly stealth, supplants that commonweal which is so 
much more than wealth. Favoritism is its market. It 
translates man as a commodity and has sway by indirect 
bribery. Blind Plutus ! 

139 



Oligarchy. It is " the few" in power, whether a clique, a 
bureau, a machine, or a ring. It saps the general strength 
and despoils representation of reality. Its odium is its as- 
sumption and its irresponsibility. Its inner wheels, its coali- 
tions and coteries, befool the ballot, and by its supple trick- 
eries the peerage of freemen is undermined. Officialdom is 
one of its forms. Slates, stolen primaries, and the star- 
chamber deals of state committees are some of its familiar 
features. 

Aristocracy then, — a fair term, "the rule by the best"; but 
practically it means the self -elect at their own appraisal — 
a close corporation of opportunists. Or it illustrates " the 
fine irony of an entailed nobility." The taint of heraldry and 
the attainder of mere hereditary privilege is superciliousness 
and snobbery and the dry rot of these, the insolence of class 
prerogative and the inhuman proscriptions of caste. " The 
best," by all means: but not the self-styled such, nursing 
their cheap exclusiveness and affecting to be the chauffeurs 
of the world. The day of the House of Lords is passing in 
those lands where parliamentary law has become the register 
of the people's liberty. The Electoral College is of this 
piece, an antiquated absurdity, tolerated, but sure to break 
into flying dust under any strain of honest application. Our 
method of incubating United States senators is another illus- 
tration of this bad leverage, making them the creatures of a 
camarilla. It will some day be reformed in the interests of 
responsibility. 

As to Anarchy. It is a contradiction in terms. Its ideas 
cancel. Putting caprice for reason, it denies law, which is 
the organ of liberty, for the sake of that license which is 
liberty's parody and defeat. Its " red laughter " is madness. 
It is the " cloke of wickedness " and would crush freedom 
under the absolutism of the mob. It is the anti-gospel of 
" Every man for himself ! " In the name of " the law of 
liberty " organized mankind smites this adder. For freedom 
is not the absence of restraint: it is the absence of false re- 

140 



straint. All violence jeopards equal social justice. But re- 
member that to deny that any man is a part is to incite him 
to forget that he is only a part. Suppression begets explo- 
sion. Men unvindicated are the material for men vindic- 
tive. If a system breeds nightmares it will breed their 
riders ! 

As to Theocracy; it is actual while God lives, else all hopes 
for the creature are " built on stubble." The ethics of col- 
lective humanity derive at last from Him only. Its reach 
does not alter the rule. All politics is either applied ethics 
or it is shorn of rationality; but ethics is concerned with 
universal relation. The right divine is never delegated to 
any vicegerent. It is fulfilled in the common consent of free 
consciences, and is plagiarized by kingcraft or priestcraft. 

At last, Democracy, the people's self-government, a gen- 
eral trusteeship of sovereignity. All personality dignified by 
that accountable share, with all its sanctions, which He 
intended who is its source and its strength. " Legitimate 
governments ( says President Hadley ) are administered in 
the interests of the whole body politic." See the ultimate 
implications of this; for the prime interest of each several 
man is to realize and to exercise the fullest rational free- 
dom, to be a mechanic of the nation, not a mechanism, — to 
move toward that corporate activity where none is lord, 
none underling, to " walk at liberty " within that law of 
which he is a part. 

Democracy may be an abused term for the tyranny of 
multitudes, a mass deflected by passion and by demagogs 
who pander to it, flattering while they defile: but then the 
self-control of the people is by its means thwarted of its 
ends, and the true equation is lost. For the ideal rests upon 
the diffusion of that conscience which is fulfilled in " work- 
ing no ill to its neighbor," and which resents for him and 
for itself the two tyrannies of constriction and of excess. 
But mark that the cure for the perversion from the ideal is 
not less democracy, but better. 

141 



I maintain that Christianity is radically inter-human, that 
it is no respecter of appearance, that its elemental program 
is to shake every middle wall of partition, that it knocks in 
God's name at every closed door, that it necessarily implies 
Democracy. As strenuously, I maintain that its precepts 
are the only foundation upon which Democracy has logically 
developed, or upon which it can thrive and endure. 

For implicitly the Son of Man rests His case upon the 
right valuation of men. He and none other has exalted the 
peoples into freedom. His autonomy secures theirs. His 
theorem, if demonstrated, makes the unconstrained and 
abundant life its corrolary. " Free grace " announces the 
" square deal " and bids every man stand up and be counted. 
It was the " good news " that God's love leaves no one out, 
that a total mankind has " eminent domain " as against all 
" adverse possession." And Democracy, for and by the peo- 
ple, admits no pre-emption of authority. It emancipates 
into the right to seek the best, while it enjoins the duty to 
offer the most. Privilege and obligation interpret each the 
other. Thus in a republic the delegated agents of the peo- 
ple are " public servants " — stewards, accountable to the 
authority which commissions them. In any other term they 
are defaulters and forfeit their credentials. Democracy and 
Christianity, the human expression and the divine inspira- 
tion, make up together the final experiment of time. To- 
gether they fare or fail; but if these fail all fails ! The 
bankruptcy of one involves the other. Unless men can learn 
to reason deeply, both as to the basis and the scope of rights 

— then cataclysm. Law and love — " one and inseparable " 

— or the deluge! "Liberty and union" mean all that 
Webster meant, and mean far more. The whole probation 
of mankind is as to whether he will seek that true common- 
wealth of souls which banishes all false claims : but this is 
Democracy ! Of such a new society the Gospel of Christ is 
the plan and specification, and to conquer this ideal into 
actuality is the one task and travail of this Earth. We are 

142 



shut up to it. Nothing else is left to try; and so, to doubt, 
to flinch, to surrender, is to desert the cause of both God 
and Man ! 

There are, I am aware, some sickly and sentimental dis- 
senters from the genius and goal of the peoples' calling, 
whispering or whining their rejection of the substantive 
claim of man as man. This disregard for the many, this 
reluctancy from the burden of the problem, is ordinarily 
traceable ( when not merely academic ) to an absentee spirit 
which assumes to distrust what love of ease dislikes. It 
never preaches a full- width righteousness. Its complacent 
apathy would postpone everything for the sake of the status 
quo. Affecting a silken piety, it forgets that all modern 
prophets — the Luthers, Wesleys, yes, the Tolstois, have 
been, in effect, great champions of the submerged and for- 
gotten, uplifting aspiration in the hopeless, seeking that 
which is lost, and restoring that cardinal proof of the Mes- 
siah, " the poor have the Gospel." These superficial invesr 
tors in the present as it is, will take no stock in the future as 
it should be. Like Lot's wife, they interpret the majo- 
considerations of life by the minor. For them, too, " the 
offense of the cross is not ceased." But in the face of an 
awakening world they are as imbecile as they are futile. 

But also there are such as applaud democracy without 
perceiving either its exactions or its guarantees. Let none 
praise democracy as an end in itself, and ignore the obliga- 
tions attending its permissions. It is justified not in its 
apparatus but in its purpose; not in its negative protest 
but in its constructiveness; in that steadfastly regulated 
equity which distributes the burden as well as the benefit. 
Consideration for all others, as bound with them " in the 
bundle of life," is its basilar strength: but this is also " the 
law of Christ." The more powerful it is, the more does it 
require the delicate control which only that supreme love 
can furnish which " seeketh not its own." Either altruism 
or absolutism; for there is no logical half-way. 

143 



Can man learn that reciprocity which lifts all around ? 
Can he realize that every personality has a birthright, that 
civil and religious freedom are two sides of but one thing, 
that low forms of society and low conceptions of God go 
together ? If not, — if anything but a cluster of preferred 
creditors offsetting a bulk of subservients is a fond dream; 
if the Nazarene was an impracticable enthusiast, emotional 
rather than rational; if great populations are to be ruled 
from without rather than from within; if the martial is 
better than the domestic and the industrial, — then all falls 
back into the arms of mere force; then half-developed 
peoples instead of being taught self -direction are to be the 
prey of robber strength; then " the gospel of blood and 
iron" is to prevail; then the idea of the old Roman empire 
is to re-conquer the Galilean ! This is the dilemma: right- 
eousness or cunning power; Nitzsche's man or Christ ! The 
last question is whether this Earth is to be a home or a 
menagerie ! 

Now any government is at a given time as strong as it 
has purposes worthy to be believed in, and no stronger. 
Perceived or not, the bottoming idea of democracy is the 
utmost diffusion of two things — authority and responsi- 
bility. All of its hopes are reducible to the balancing of 
these two. All of its phases and attempts here are judged. 
This duality is the law of its life. Within it each whole 
man, and because a man, is to " count one." Persons are 
its units, and their union is to be without confusion or seces- 
sion. Its divisor exactly matches its dividend, and the 
quotient is one. A division of labor which is distorted to 
mean " You labor and I divide " is not democracy. So 
then, in this joint severalty where every man should count 
one, not a half, not two, every man should be fitted to count 
one ! Democracy must vigilantly demand and strive toward 
this fitness of its units, and stabs itself by neglect of it. 

The ballot affirms the indisputable right of each integer. 
Only so is it valid. Its qualified intelligence is its security 
144 



that it shall always be counted as one, and never less or 
more. Less it were tyrannized, more it were tyrannical. 
The only real voter is the independent voter, and to seduce 
or to intimidate him violates manhood. Degradation is dis- 
franchisement. Democracy agrees with Christianity to say 
that every man should count one, and that because he 
should he shall ! Nothing else ever believed this, or 
declared it, or attempted it. But the tools are for the task. 
No theory works itself. This one cannot be carried; it 
must walk. It must wrench itself out of dullness and delay. 
It must lift itself away from the appeal and stress of mere 
passion, and cease to be pleased with? flattery and fireworks. 
" Use your freedom." It is not an end but a means, a con- 
dition of opportunity, a capacity. It makes normal action 
possible; but this must be fulfilled in the wisdom and the 
will to do ! 

Therefore education, the tutoring of men in their duty to 
secure their rights. Provision for this is self -protection. 
Liberty thinks, enslavement only feels. Ignorance breeds 
political bastards. Every election that is not a farce is an 
appeal to opinion and purpose. Thus the people say, We 
will have it so, and so. The greatest state shall be that one 
with the greatest ratio of voters who think clearly and reso- 
lutely, and who will not be browbeaten or cajoled. This is 
pivotal. The minority which thinks will at last outnumber 
those who only pretend to. By thinking, man in both 
senses comes to his majority. 

Let this be seen in the rise of Humanism. It was a part 
of the subsoiling of the world for the seed of Democracy. 
Freedom breathed thro the new learning. Letters were 
Republican. It was the mind of man pawing to get free. 
Thus the school is the arsenal of the people's rights, and a 
College is a battery of men ! The specialty of education is 
liberty; for it rests upon " the right assessment of what 
constitutes human value." 

In the last analysis, Democracy rests its dictum upon the 

145 



bench of justice. The court embodies the people's con- 
science as to equity. Its decree registers their deliberation 
and their relf-restraint. It becomes, under God, their ulti- 
mate affirmation and refuge. It is the final institute of 
liberty. 

Under that fraternity of men which the evangel mapped, 
the Ishmaelitish spirit recedes. The history of human 
arrangements unfolds this generic man- right. This is the 
developing purpose of the parturient years. Thro slow eras, 
or in convulsive epochs, the impulse has pushed as by 
hydraulic pressure. The paramount description of a man 
is that he has a passport to all the freedom he can use, and 
to an equal chance to show how much that is. He shall 
resist whatever would steal or crush his fair share of it; for 
to yield to such dispossession is to deny the nature God 
gave him. Well said Lincoln, that foremost modern repre- 
sentative of the fine old family of man, in 1856, " They who 
deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and 
under the rule of a just God can not long retain it." 

Liberty is menaced today in its own household by pride 
of power, by lust of empire, by a somnolent and unprotest- 
ing Church with little else than soft words for Mammon; 
but what shall it profit democracy if it gain the whole world 
and lose its own life ! To enable and ennoble * every crea- 
ture under heaven ' toward his fullest possibilities is the 
formative idea of a just society, and it should remove all 
that opposes this, by pick or by powder. Democracy and 
Christianity have it in common that we profess both and 
practice neither, except tentatively and with limiting reser- 
vations. Neither has yet been fully worked. Men fear and 
resent both the law of love and the law of liberty; but alike 
they must either be applied or abandoned. 

To reduce its limitations to the lowest terms, to exalt its 
universality, liberty is to be delivered both from those who 
assume to monopolize and from those who dare degrade it; 
for to rule and to serve are the two halves of the divine pur- 

146 



pose that all men shall be " kings and priests unto God,'* 
and this purpose can be interpreted neither by the aristocrat 
nor the mob. 

In quoting Bismarck's characteristic saying, that " After 
all a benevolent, rational absolutism is the best form of gov- 
ernment," Matthew Arnold replies: " The one fatal objection 
to it is that it is against nature, that it contradicts a vital 
instinct in man — the instinct of expansion. The impulse 
of democracy is identical with the ceaseless effort of human 
nature itself." Hear ! Hear ! indeed. Always to be chosen 
for, rather than to choose, is arrested development, pro- 
longed childishness. Nations arriving at their majority put 
away this nursing bottle of royalty, this theory of unchange- 
able babyhood, which offers tin toys to adults and spanks 
bearded men ! Littoral Canute can not scold back the 
untamable tides — sceptre and spectre depart together. Let 
the chess-game picture the play of titular rank. There are 
kings and consorts, castles, bishops ( ever diagonal ), 
knights erratic, pawns as the servitors and spoil of these; 
and for a parable the white always with the first move. 
But * the order changeth.' The day of the pawn comes. 
In testudo, he advances to the king row, turns transfigured, 
and gives checkmate ! " Democracy ( said Lowell ) is that 
form of society in which every man has a chance and knows 
that he has it." 

What is our " Monroe doctrine " but this, that we mean 
that our democracy shall not have its influence narrowed by 
the proximity of any other theory of the people ? To 
maintain this theory of the people undamaged, and to hold 
its vantage unimpaired, we would fight ( tho God forbid the 
emergency ) till all the seas ran red ! It was with this 
instinct that we lifted Cuba from the dunghill to place an 
unquenchable star upon her brow, still keeping faith with 
freedom. 

The Gospel's idea accords with the idea of Democracy. 
Their aims are cognate, their purposes mutual. They join 

147 



in that view of inter-human rights of which International 
Law is the logical resultant. They alike resent " every yoke 
of bondage,' ' and intend that freedom which is the clearing- 
house of mankind. Each seeks the greatest quantity of the 
highest quality, and demands that none shall be outside of 
law, none beneath it, none above it. They " come to make 
the best the world knows native to the humblest." 

The Son of Man is man's Man ! He arraigns all despot- 
isms, and threatens every divisive artificiality, every defraud- 
ing, every treachery to the human cause. Before Him every 
antiquated lie of caste stands disheveled, every usurpation 
shudders, and every " prisoner of hope " leaps up with joy. 
" All for each and each for all," is the bold and beautiful 
charter which is sealed with His cross. " And the govern- 
ment shall be upon His shoulder ! " 

Democracy is not " the multitude in power with no ade- 
quate ideal to elevate and guide": but it is the people 
guided and elevated as common shareholders in a celestial- 
ized manhood. It is indigenous to Christianity, and is 
implied by that. Dependence upon God, independence of 
all insalutary duress, interdependence as fellows and friends, 
these are the three signals of what the " Leader and Com- 
mander of the peoples " purposes and will perform. They 
stamp all temporizing expedients with paresis. To deny 
them is both apostacy from the faith and barratry against 
the ship of state. 

All gain in appreciating what whole democracy both 
includes and excludes, has been, consciously or not, an 
appreciation of Christ's idea of man. Painfully it has pene- 
trated the banal policies and sodden politics of the world, 
attended by harsh reactions and bitter doubts, but despite 
the appalling follies of those who " promised liberty, while 
themselves the servants of corruption," it has continued and 
will conquer. 

The timid dread the birth-pangs of change, and the near- 
sighted refuse to think beyond the status they have cap- 
148 



tured: but the dynasty of the few becomes decrepit and 
nigh to vanishing. The Magnificat was the annunciation of 
a new society. It enfolded an apocalypse: "He hath put 
down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low 
degree." " The Desire of all nations " makes all classes 
" dangerous classes," and those the most so who absent 
themselves from concern for that cause of the people which 
widens and deepens with each newest day, and before whose 
" awful rose of dawn " the lanterns of the groping years 
grow dim. 

For Democracy this America, this people's land ! Hither 
they come who would escape the mortmain of stole and 
throne. We are building better than we know, and repeat 
Columbus, " who only sought a way and found a world." 
Our freedoms are not ours to seclude. If we forget His 
purpose, wide as the Earth is, Who begat these, we abandon 
their security. To evade the duty is to despise the blessing. 
If this Sampson, shorn and blind, lays hands upon those two 
commandments which are the pillars of a divinely human 
society, he shall indeed " make sport for the Philistines," 
but in catastrophe and common burial ! 

Before the envious fallacies of both ermine and rags, 
America is to retract nothing of her earlier faith in the sov- 
ereignty of God and in the sanctity of man, His child. She 
is still the pioneer of the cause of man, not to exploit a con- 
tinent but to uplift a race. The enlargement of men from 
both slavery and license is pressed upon us by our double 
faith. We " shall walk at liberty because we seek His pre- 
cepts," " as free and not abusing freedom." And shall we 
not thus move ? 

" Humanity with all its fears, 
With all the hopes of future years, 
Is hanging breathless on thy fate." 

Well said Grover Cleveland, at St. Louis, " It is a solemn 
thing to belong to a nation favored of God." 

149 



Men of the Class of 1905: 

Stand up, then, and stay up, to meet the possibilities of 
these big years with conscience and backbone. Hear the 
high trumpet. It calls you to be as brave as wise. God and 
your time summon you also to the potential throngs whose 
hair is unflecked and whose blood is full of iron. You rep- 
resent no school of doubt, of hesitation, of moral pusillani- 
mity. Just, sympathetic, unconditional, stand with lip and 
life to resist the reign of greed and graft, the cunning that 
plays Jacob's trick upon Esau, and the rash surrender of the 
birthright. Let all that assails man-right sting you to testify 
and to act. Let no good cause lack you, let no right event 
fail because any of you is a coward absentee. Down to 
that day when your final valedictorian shall speak your final 
word, be such as wear their swords to the hilt, such soldiers 
of democracy and of godliness, of society and its salvation, 
as those in whom and by whom " the Lion of the tribe of 
Judah shall prevail to open the book ! " 



150 



• CORRECTIONS: 

Page 65, 30 th line, spell transcendent. 

Page 72, 10th line, speech, 

Page 102, 14th line, for contract read construct. 



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